LEWIS HINE (1874-1940) took up photo-graphy to call attention to social injustice and to campaign for change. This respect for the exploited and oppressed individual established him as an embodiment of American values. His images celebrated the dignity of working people in the modern world and gave a voice to the ordinary men, women and children who did not, or could not, speak for themselves.
Modern memory of the Civil War owes much to the lens of Mathew Brady, one of the most famous and paradoxical figures in American photography. During a career that spanned the 1840s to the 1890s, Mathew Brady consciously set out to capture the pivotal moments of the second half of the nineteenth century. The best of his brilliant work is here, including his famous portraits of President Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, the Union dead, and Robert E. Lee—haunting images that strove to create the vision of a stable, purposeful republic even as national identity was fragmenting.
A pioneer of the photographic medium and one of the Civil War's greatest chroniclers records its monumental personalities, its decisive battles, and its unmatched price in dead and injured and in devastated land.