Brady was innate inside Warren County, New York, as the boy of Irish immigrants. He moved to New York City at the age of Seventeen. By 1844, he had his have photography studio around Up to date York, & by 1845, Brady began to exhibit his portraits of famous Americans. Brady's early images were daguerreotypes and he won numbers of awards for his operate; in the 1850's ambrotype photography became popular, which gave way to the albumen print, a paper pic produced from either big glass negatives virtually all usually utilized in the Western Civil War photography. Around 1859, Paris photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri introduced cartes de visite and these small pictures (the size of the camping card) chop-chop became a popular novelty by using hundreds to thousands one images sold in the United States.

Brady's efforts to document a Civil War around a grand shell by bringing his photographic studio perfect onto the field of honor earned Brady his place in history. Despite a perceptible dangers, fiscal chance, & discouragement of his friends he is late quoted when saying "I had to go. A spirit in my feet said 'Go,' and I went." His number one popular pic of a conflict were at the First Battle of Bull Run, in which he had close plenty to the action that he was all but captured.

He listed Alexander Gardner, James Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan, William Pywell, George Barnard, and eighteen other men, each of whom were given a traveling darkroom, to go out and photograph scenes from the Civil War. Brady usually stayed inside Washington, D.C., organizing his assistants and rarely visited battlefields personally. a notable exception was the Second Battle of Bull Run in 1862, where his pic of retreating Union soldiers created a sensation.

Around 1862, Brady presented an exhibition of photographs from either a Battle of Antietam in his New York gallery entitled, "The Dead of Antietam." Several of a images therein presentation were graphic photo of corpses, making the presentation wholly fresh to United states. There are no a single got seen anything such as this prior to.

Brady photographed portraits of numbers of generals in the war, like Nathaniel Banks, Don Carlos Buell, Ambrose Burnside, Benjamin Butler, George Custer, David Farragut, John Gibbon, Winfield Hancock, Samuel P. Heintzelman, Joseph Hooker, Oliver Howard, David Hunter, John Logan, Irvin McDowell, George McClellan, James McPherson, George Meade, David Dixon Porter, William Rosecrans, John Schofield, William Sherman, Daniel Sickles, Henry Warner Slocum, George Stoneman, Edwin V. Sumner, George Thomas, Emory Upton, James Wadsworth, and Lew Wallace. On the Confederate side, Brady managed to photograph P.G.T. Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee. (Lee's foremost session by using Brady was within 1845 as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, his final after the war in Richmond, Virginia.) Brady also photographed Abraham Lincoln on many occasions.

In a period of the war Brady spent across $100,000 to produce 10,000 prints. He potential a U.S. government to find a exposure after a war ended, however after the food & drug administration refused to clean sol he was forced to sell his Future York City studio and last into bankruptcy. Congress granted Brady $25,000 within 1875, but he remained deeply inside debt. Depressed by his fiscal situation, Brady became an dipsomaniac & died penurious within the charity ward of Presbyterian Hospital in Up to date York City, from either complications ensuing the trolley car accident. His funeral was financed by veterans of the Seventh Up to date York Infantry & he is buried around Congressional Cemetery within Wash..