Wordpress images broken after upload on ubuntu 14.04

Ubuntu: 14.04

Wordpress: 3.8.2

I'm migrating an old website to a fresh setup using wordpress front-ended with nginx. It's mostly gone fine, including creating a custom theme, but when I upload images they will only show as broken links.

The upload process itself seems to work. I checked the location on the file system and the files are there in all their different sizes. If I go into "Edit Image" for the uploaded image, I can see it, but every other location in wordpress admin and the main website shows a broken link.

Here is proof that the files are successfully uploading through wp-admin:

root@[hostname]:/srv/www/wp-content/[hostname]/uploads/2014/11# ls -al
total 284
drwxrwxr-- 2 www-data www-data   4096 Nov  8 01:12 .
drwxrwxr-- 3 www-data www-data   4096 Nov  8 01:03 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data  10450 Nov  8 01:03 SJB_0227-150x150.jpg
-rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data  20732 Nov  8 01:03 SJB_0227-199x300.jpg
-rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data  89325 Nov  8 01:03 SJB_0227.jpg
-rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data  10069 Nov  8 01:12 SJB_0229-150x150.jpg
-rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data  22616 Nov  8 01:12 SJB_0229-300x199.jpg
-rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 118579 Nov  8 01:12 SJB_0229.jpg

My /etc/wordpress/config-[hostname].php includes:

define('WP_CONTENT_DIR', '/srv/www/wp-content/[hostname]');

The relevant part of my nginx config:

root /var/www/html/wordpress;
        index index.php;
        server_name [hostname];

        location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
        }

        location ~ \.php$ {
                try_files $uri =404;
                fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
                include fastcgi_params;
        }

I should note that ubuntu automatically created a full /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-content directory, although I'm not sure what that is used for as the files uploaded through wp-admin show up in WP_CONTENT_DIR defined above.

On my main website the links do not work, and are formed like:

http://[hostname]/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/SJB_0229.jpg

Everything except for viewing images works fine with the website. What am I missing?

UPDATE:

I have a solution below. I should also note that the /var/www/html/wordpress path above was actually a symlink to /usr/share/wordpress that I had created and forgot about. However the issue persisted when it was changed to the actual location.