Nobody wanted to know about the Civil War now. While it was still being fought, everyone did. When the dour Scotsman, Alexander Gardner, had taken his picture, Home of the Rebel Sharpshooter, it had made him famous. Yet when his collection, a world classic, was published the year after war’s end, it didn’t sell.

Then there was Brady himself. People often imagined he took every picture of the Civil War. After all, his name was on so many of the pictures taken by the photographers he’d hired—a fact they sometimes resented. Yet to be fair, it was Brady who’d been the first in the field. At the start of the war, when the Confederates smashed the Union men at Bull Run, Brady had been there on the battlefield, lucky not to be a casualty.

It wasn’t Brady’s fault that his failing eyesight made it difficult for him to take the pictures himself. But he’d sent out those keen young men, set them up, provided them with movable darkrooms, all out of his own pocket. And what had he got from it all, when the war was over? Financial ruin.

“People don’t want to be reminded of those horrors,” said Theodore. “They wanted to forget them the moment the war was done.” In the South, he’d heard, the agony of defeat was so terrible that quite a few photographers had even destroyed their own work.

“So why do you show this work?” asked Horace Slim.

“Same reason you write, I dare say,” answered Theodore. “A photographer and a journalist both have a duty to record: to tell the truth, and not let people forget.”

“The horrors of war, you mean—the killing?”

“Not really. That was important of course, Mr. Slim, but others had already covered it.”

“Like Brady.”

“Exactly. In ’62, when the most terrible battles began, Brady had photographers with General Grant when he went into Tennessee. They recorded the carnage at Shiloh. Brady’s boys were in Virginia that summer, when Stonewall Jackson and General Lee saved Richmond from destruction. They were there when the Confederates struck back at us in Kentucky, and they were up in Maryland that fall, when Lee was turned back at Antietam. Do you remember the great exhibition Brady organized after Antietam, when he showed the world what the battlefield looked like after that terrible slaughter? It was a wonder to me, sir, that those photographs did not stop war altogether.” He shook his head. “Brady had photographers at the Battle of Gettysburg the next summer also, but I wasn’t one of them, you see—I didn’t become a Brady photographer until a couple of months after that. So maybe my task was different. Anyway,” he gestured to the photographs on the walls, “this is what I did.”