Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1964 | Volume 15, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1964 | Volume 15, Issue 2
The picture any President presents to the public is unlikely to be the picture he himself sees. It may not even be the picture seen by those who are closest to him. Neither the camera nor the typewriter is apt to make a wholly accurate portrayal—partly, no doubt, because the White House is inevitably a distorting glass whose images are always subject to a certain amount of retouching, and partly too because any human being, whether he be President of the United States or the humblest voter in a remote precinct, is always a good deal more complex than is commonly realized.
Anyway, it is hard to feel sure that we are seeing any President as he really was, and the amount of exposure a President gets does not help very much. By design or by accident, an image is created, usually fairly early in the game, and what comes later tends to conform to it. We ourselves, as spectators, even help make it conform; we have our own notion of the man, and we are likely to cling to it, discarding bits of evidence that do not fit our preconceived pattern.
There is available now a remarkable collection of pictures of one of the best-known of all American Presidents, Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln in Photographs , compiled by Charles Hamilton and Lloyd Ostendorf and containing, as far as the authors are able to determine—and they have spent years in careful search—every existing photograph of the man. In all, 119 separate photographs of Lincoln are reproduced here; good pictures and poor ones, pictures wholly familiar and pictures nobody but specialists ever saw before, the sum total actually providing something of a new look at the man. It is of course possible that other pictures do exist somewhere, and from time to time one or another of them may come to light, but at the moment this is the most complete collection there is, and succeeding years are not likely to add much to it.
It goes without saying that the book is wholly fascinating, and it contains a few minor surprises.
It is a little surprising, for instance, to see how many photographs of Lincoln there actually are. The camera was a fairly new device when he was in the White House, and it was cumbersome. There was no corps of White House news photographers because news photographers in the modern sense did not exist. No man could take a snapshot then; every picture was a time exposure, and most pictures were taken in the studio, carefully posed and lighted. Today a President can hardly put his head out of the front door without being photographed, but it was very different in the 1860’s. Indeed, one of the minor surprises here is the comparatively large number of pictures made out of doors, some of them entirely unposed.
Most of the pictures, of course, are studio shots, and