1. The book that Lincoln held in his lap in the Mathew Brady studios was a photograph album. However, in most reproductions of the image, the book is either captioned as, or made to look like, a Bible. The 1865 Currier & Ives’ lithograph based on the pose was titled President Lincoln at Home, Reading the Scriptures to His Wife and Son. One can see the deliberate visual changes made by the artisans reproducing the image by comparing two engravings published by H.B. Hall. Look closely at the visual detail of the books: the first reproduces the book as a photo album, the second as a Bible. Lincoln himself worried over the book’s falsely “biblical” appearance. In Lincoln in Photographs, Lloyd Ostendorf relays Lincoln’s concern that any visual fabrications representing the photo album as a Bible would amount to “a species of false pretence.” Lincoln’s brief but suggestive comment makes explicit what the photograph’s changing nature asserts implicitly: images can and do lie.
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Author, “Title of Article,” Commonplace: the journal of early American life, date accessed, URL.
Sophie White, “Trading Looks Race, Religion and Dress in French America,” Commonplace: the journal of early American life, accessed September 30, 2019, https://commonplace.online/article/trading-looks-race-religion-dress-french-america/
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