MISCELLANY

PHOTO SLEUTH DISCOVERY

hile researching Civil War-era photographers, Library of Congress conservator turned photographic sleuth Adrienne Lundgren found that a famous image of the March 1861 inauguration of Abraham Lincoln was taken not by Alexander Gardner, as long assumed, but by government photographer John Wood. Lundgren pieced together that in 1853 President Franklin Pierce had Montgomery Meigs, who would serve as the Union’s quartermaster general during the Civil War, supervise the expansion of the U.S. Capitol, including the wings and dome. Meigs hired Wood to take a photographic survey of architecture in Washington, D.C., and in 1857, Wood had also taken a photo of the James Buchanan 1857 inauguration from a vantage point that identically matched the Lincoln inauguration image. Moreover, the image itself, of which only three copies survive, was made on salted, large format paper, characteristic of Wood’s architectural images. So far, inference only. Then Lundgren nailed it when she discovered a page in Illustrated Times Weekly, a British paper, containing a drawn depiction of the inauguration credited, “from a photograph by Mr. J. Wood.”