Well probably not personally since he's been dead for over a century now. So if you say, "Yeah, hey, that's Matt!" you are probably a vampire and should be staked.
Though you may not know this man's face, you know the faces of hundreds of figures from the mid-to-late-nineteenth century because of the portraits that this man photographed of them. The whole "baseball trading card line up" of civil war officers and generals comes to us because this man dragged a horse and wagon up and down the lines and battlefields of the civil war.
All the most horrendous photos of smoked out fields and pockmarked ditches littered with the bodies of the dead were captured by him and then exposed in the darkroom inside that rickety wagon. When you think of all the volatile chemicals that go into photography this man was really taking his life into his own hands. Not to mention the cannons, rifle, and musket fire.
Some would say that Mathew Brady was the first photojournalist for exposing people far away from the front to images of actual warfare. Others would say he was the first muckraker for exposing an ugly underbelly of society that some people would never want to have to look at.
Interestingly, newspapers had no way of reproducing Brady's images in print. So the newspapers would get copies of the photographic prints and then a carving artist would have to carve out a woodblock of the photograph to reproduce in the newspapers.
Kind of like duplicating mimeograph images on a blog site.
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