Featured on PDR in the collection Samuel G. Szabó’s Rogues, A Study of Characters (1857)

Celebrity photography begins with Mathew Brady. His groundbreaking 1850 book of daguerreotypes, The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, presented portraits of twenty-four of “the most eminent citizens of the American Republic”, ranging from the Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing to the pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun. The idea of the album was to present these men (and they were all men) as “representative” — just as, in the 1860s, Brady’s war photography, in Walt Whitman’s words, would gather together portraits of “typical men…from opposing parties and convictions, representing in their varieties and oppositions after all a Common Country”.