Civil War photographer Mathew B. Brady and his assistants shot 10,000+ photographs during the war. He worked with heavy glass plates coated with the flammable liquid collodion, which then had to be put into into a bath of silver nitrate. That created a photosensitive silver iodide on the plate. Exposure - and processing! - had to take place before the plate dried, in minutes. Most of the work was done in the field, in all kinds of weather and sometimes with shells and bullets whizzing past. Brady and his helpers photographed anything and everything related to the war, the idea being that it was impossible to know what would be seen as significant and valuable to people in the future. He felt compelled to document as much as he possibly could.

He took lots of "snapshots" of relatively mundane scenes, but just about all of them are valuable today.

It is estimated that Brady spent the modern equivalent of well over a million dollars on the project, going deeply into debt. He thought that surely the investment would pay off. But after the war people wanted to forget the horrific scenes and Brady's business collapsed and he died in a poor house, penniless and still deeply in debt.

Mathew Brady Civil War Photographs

Camp scene by The U.S. National Archives, on Flickr