Photography in the Village

19th Century Greenwich Village cultivated pioneers of poetry, innovators of literature, and leaders of science. Yet, a new art emerged with equal force and consequence in the narrative of American history – the art of photography. As Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre refined his new photographic process in Paris, Professors Samuel F. B. Morse and John W. Draper of the University of the City of New York followed suit in America, using NYU’s Main Building on Washington Square East as their daguerrean laboratory. Their combined efforts played a pioneering role in the early development of photography in the United States. Within NYU’s Gothic Revival Main Building, Morse and Draper trained the first American daguerreotypists, including the father of photojournalism, Mathew Brady.

Mathew Brady operated four different galleries on Broadway – and two in Greenwich Village – and identified himself with the street’s bustling excitement, capturing throughout his career, the character of the Village’s main thoroughfare. As America’s leaders flocked to Brady’s Broadway Studios to have their likenesses captured, Brady rose to eminence as the fashionable photographer of his day. Mathew Brady’s portraiture also played a role in electing Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of the United States, amidst the tumultuous political environment at the cusp of the Civil War. Brady’s reputation as America’s foremost photographer began in Greenwich Village. The artistic and scientific fervor of New York’s 15th Ward elevated Brady to the apogee of America’s new art, and cultivated the father of modern photography.

The following pages endeavor to show the role Greenwich Village played in birth of American photography, and further, to demonstrate the legacy of the Village’s creative atmosphere in the career of Mathew Brady. The accompanying imagery also aims to illustrate a few of the photographic mediums used by America’s first photographers, showing how the art developed in the United States.