Name: Did This Photo Make Lincoln President? | The Bigger Picture with Vincent Brown | PBS
Uploaded: 2024-08-15T09:02:59.000Z
Duration: 11 min 23 s
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In politics today, it's hard to underestimate the power of image-making.

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During campaigns, we're deluged with photographs of candidates, carefully chosen to shape public opinion.

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We might think of this as a new phenomenon, but far from it.

Take this portrait of Abraham Lincoln from 1860.

It looks like a straightforward image of one of America's greatest presidents, but as we'll discover, this portrait is a turning point in the history of campaign photography.

It suggests that the use of photographs by political candidates is about as old as photography itself.

In 1860, America was heading towards a pivotal presidential election.

The future of slavery would be on the ballot, and it threatened to tear the country apart.

Among the candidates for the Republican nomination was a self-taught lawyer from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln.

It's hard to imagine now, but back then, his success was far from guaranteed.

In a crowded field of candidates, few people knew who Lincoln was, and those who did saw him as an uncouth frontiersman from the West.

So did Abraham Lincoln have an image problem?

People in the East thought of him as sort of a slam-bang, rustic orator who spit in a spittoon, took off his jacket while he spoke.

They had misapprehensions about whether he was dignified enough to be a national candidate.

To confront these concerns, Lincoln accepted an invitation to deliver a political lecture in New York City at an event that took place here at a private college known as the Cooper Union.

So what was Lincoln trying to achieve with this address?

So this is the place where Lincoln gave the most important speech of his career, the make-or-break moment of his political career, his national aspirations.

On February 27, 1860, Lincoln stood at this very podium, shuffled his notes, and addressed the crowd.

He starts out with his Western accent and his voice pitched a little too high and not carrying well.

And there is a journalist in the front row here who makes a note, Old man, this will never do, this is New York.

And by the time he finishes, he writes a second notation, I think he's the greatest man since St.

Lincoln's speech may have won the audience over that night, but he still had a problem.

Did his looks have anything to do with that problem?

I mean, he was an ungainly-looking fellow, and photographs don't tell the half of it.

He had acne scars from his childhood, he had moles all over his face, he had weird features, you know, giant ears, a big blunt nose, kind of a Jay Leno jaw, his hair stood up in all directions.

And he joked about his appearance publicly, famously during the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Douglas accused him of being two-faced, and Lincoln said, if I had another face, do you think I'd be wearing this one?

Fortunately, Lincoln was about to get some help.

Hours before he gave his speech, his supporters had booked time with one of the best-known photographers in New York City, Matthew Brady.

Matthew Brady was a well-established, in fact, internationally-known portrait photographer at the time that he photographed Abraham Lincoln.

In other words, this would have been like having your portrait taken by someone like Annie Leibovitz today.

Brady courted the famous, encouraged them to come.

He was very aware of the camera's ability as a tool of history, and he basically cast himself, in a sense, as a historian with a camera, that he felt that preserving the faces of the individuals who were impacting the nation's direction in history was an important role to play.

In this awkward Illinois attorney, Brady faced one of his greatest artistic challenges.

How did Brady actually compose this photograph to address Lincoln's image problem?

He's standing, looking in the direction of the camera, but not straight into it, sort of eye on the horizon, looking off a little bit.

It almost gives you that sense of Lincoln thinking deeper thoughts or looking toward the future.

That also implies something about a thoughtful person.

And Brady decides brilliantly, I'm going to put a background of a pillar of state and some books to suggest metaphorically that this is a learned man.

He's not going to focus on that craggy, scarred, mole-filled face.

He's going to pull back and got his massive frame and emphasize that this is a really big, strong man.

And then at the last minute, Brady says to Lincoln, will you pull your collar up?

And Lincoln looks at him and says, oh, I see you want to shorten my neck.

And here is, for the first time, a dignified, imposing Abraham Lincoln.

Taking this photograph was just the first step in making Lincoln appear electable.

The next step was to make sure people saw it.

It wasn't technologically possible at this point to reproduce an image photographically in the popular press.

So an artist working from a photograph would be the way that you would produce an image in a popular publication such as Harper's Weekly.

Harper's Weekly was one of America's most widely read and influential political magazines.

If we compare this photographic image of Lincoln to the artist's rendering of the same image, you can see what it looked like when a subscriber or purchaser on the street bought Harper's Weekly.

This is how they would have encountered Abraham Lincoln.

You can see also that it does say photographed by Brady.

Harper's Weekly played an important role in getting Brady's image in front of the public, but it wasn't the only way it circulated.

Technological advances were opening up other opportunities.

Among them, a new format known as the carte de visite, the first mass-produced photographs to become widely available.

It reminds me of the baseball cards I had when I was a kid.

This particular format was introduced in the United States in 1859.

These could be very easily produced, and they were inexpensive.

This is what really is sort of the democratization, I think, of photography, is this ability for a very low price to not only have your own portrait and portraits of your friends and family made, but also to be able to collect images of the people who are leading the nation.

It makes them real as people, in a sense.

Most Americans were never going to see Abraham Lincoln in person, but now they could actually own a photograph of him that was the closest they were going to get to having that in-person experience.

By the time of the election, Brady's image of Lincoln had been widely circulated.

The photograph did its job amazingly, because in the 1860 campaign, he did no campaigning.

The Cooper Union image appeared everywhere.

Without the photograph and the appearance at Cooper Union, he might not have been elected.

Today, the impact of this photograph on U.S. history is clear, and not just because it helped get Lincoln elected.

How do you describe the role this photo plays in the history of campaign photography?

This photograph serves as a kind of launching point for the idea that presidents not only can but should take some control over their political image, and that control has to start in the process of the campaigns.

Among the presidents who applied this lesson, just a few decades after Lincoln, was Teddy Roosevelt.

Roosevelt, as a political figure, campaigning or not, is a really interesting kind of hinge guy.

Here he's not running for anything, but he is building his political image.

So this is a photograph where Roosevelt, rich guy from the East Coast, is trying to show us he is something else.

So that when he begins his political career, everyone has this image of this guy in mind.

And then later in his life, what candidates benefit from by the time we've moved into the early 20th century is the way that photography can be more candid.

So you feel like you're at the event with Roosevelt in this photo because he's reacting in a really natural way.

So he brings us from, you know, I'm going to pose myself formally as I want you to see me, to any picture you take of me will be fantastic because it will echo everything you think I'm about.

Fast forward 100 years, when the latest technological revolution created opportunities for another little-known candidate from Illinois, Barack Obama.

The campaigns that understand those moments when technology is changing are the ones that often do better and are more successful.

In 2008, the Obama campaign took great advantage of the rise of social media, the rise of mobile photography, digital photography, and they integrated into a really successful campaign so that by the time Obama becomes president, right, he is the selfie president.

He is not only a person to photograph, but a person to be photographed with.

So obviously there are major differences between these two photos, but do you think there are similarities in the strategies that these men were using to campaign for president?

Photographically, these images couldn't be more different, as you say, but at their core they're really very, very similar.

Lincoln is trying to show us who he is and who he wants to be, and Obama is also giving us the version of himself that works photographically.

Whether it's Lincoln in 1860 or Obama, it's essentially the same set of questions that we should be asking ourselves, is why was this picture made, why am I seeing it, who wants me to see it, and for what reasons?

It's too easy to think of photography as just the mere transmission of transparent information or emotion or experience.