With all of the recent hubbub surrounding Shepard Fairey’s artistic rendering of a Barack Obama photo, it made me start to think of all of the iconic photos of past presidents. There’s JFK having a powwow with Nikita Khrushchev. Then there’s Richard Nixon bidding adieu to the White House. And who can forget this rather amusing montage of past commanders-in-chief enjoying Thanksgiving dinner or pardoning the National Thanksgiving Turkey.

But in today’s 24/7 media-saturated environment, where a global leader can make the slightest public misstep and in seconds see his faux pas posted online for the world to see, it’s easy to forget about the relative visual anonymity many of our earliest forefathers enjoyed. We can view George Washington on the bucks in our wallet, but we’d be hard-pressed to find any type of actual photo of him toiling over the Constitution, or of Thomas Jefferson enjoying an afternoon at the fishpond at Monticello.

That’s what makes the possible discovery of a photograph of Ulysses S. Grant, our 18th president, such an astounding find. Collector Randall Spencer claims that the mid-1800s daguerreotype is the real deal, acquired at the San Jose Photographic Exposition in 1992 from a collector who had a whole stack of sixth-plate daguerreotypes.

Spencer stands by his find, and a forensic photo expert has backed him up. But it’s been a hard sell, mainly because historical institutions often want an “unbroken chain of custody” to prove an artifact is genuine.(Spencer says that a system that acknowledges probability would better serve such efforts). If he is able to sell the photo, Spencer will use the funds to continue what he’s referred to as his obsessive quest to find other remnant photos of historical figures. Nice job, Spencer, and for a noble cause — just don’t dig up anything that would incriminate our founding fathers too much. The country needs some optimistic news right now, not Monica-gate II circa 1802.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 9:09 am and is filed under Jennifer Gidman. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.