Results: The History of News and Communication * Part Seventeen * The Birth of Photojournalism -- How pioneering Civil War cameramen such as Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner forever changed the way the world views warfare.

Photography historians consider Brady's images some of the most significant and beautiful of the many thousands created during the war. He became the best-known public face of legions of lesser-known or even anonymous cameramen of the Civil War generation, men such as Alexander Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan, Andrew J. Russell, John Reekie and George Barnard in the North, and George S. Cook, Michael Miley, Julian Vannerson and A.D. Lytle in the South. Are you familiar with any of these early photographers?

Their pioneering work made the Civil War the first armed conflict in history to be extensively documented in photographs. They liberated the camera from the narrow confines of the commercial studio, and proved photography's usefulness in the arena of public life as a medium of information equal to that of the written word. https://youtu.be/A7awtrPaRh8 to view the video of many photographers Have you seen any of the Civil War Photos before this survey?

Photography arrived in America at the dawn of an era of tremendous technological change. New innovations such as the telegraph, steam power and the railroad were shrinking the average American's world and causing faraway events to have a greater impact on daily life. As an increasingly curious public grew hungry for knowledge of the outside world, it embraced photography as one of many powerful tools for promoting the growth of knowledge and the progress of American society. Were you aware they had colorized these historical photos from the Library of Congress?

By the late 1850s, two innovations converged fortuitously to seal the marriage of journalism and photography. Introduced in 1851, Frederick Scott Archer introduced a new wet-plate collodion developing process enabled photographers to reproduce an infinite number of positive images from a single negative considerably faster and less expensively than before. Mass-distribution illustrated publications such as Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (founded in 1855) and Harper's Weekly (founded in 1857) arrived soon after to put photographs, copied in the form of engravings or line drawings, in front of the greatest mass audience such images had yet achieved. Were you aware of the New Wet Plate Collodion process prior to this survey?

Recognizing the potential communicative power of this new mass media tool in crafting a political candidacy, Abraham Lincoln sat for his portrait at Brady's New York studio on February 27, 1860, just hours before he was to deliver his landmark speech at the Cooper Union. The photograph appeared in Harper's Weekly as a woodcut illustration, then in the form of 100,000 cartes-de-visite (small, wallet-sized images printed on thick card stock), which Republican campaign managers distributed throughout the rest of the campaign. So great was the influence of the photograph that Brady would later report Lincoln as having said, "Brady and the Cooper Union speech made me President." Have you seen any of Lincoln's Campaign Photos before this survey?

The first ever photograph to be printed alongside print news occurred on July 1st, 1848. The French weekly periodical L'Illustration published the photograph that showed Parisian streets barricaded due to a worker's strike known as the June Days Uprising. In March of 1880 the New York tabloid Daily Graphic published the first halftone photograph that was able to get away from the engraving process required up until that point. The photo was of a shantytown in New York. The Daily Graphic was the first illustrated daily newspaper in the United States. Other publications like L'Illustration often ran weekly or periodically but not daily due to the costs associated with illustrating daily papers. New technologies in printing also increased the number of publishers and the number of copies each publisher could issue. Can you image a world without News?