MR. LINCOLN SITS FOR HIS PORTRAIT

A provocative study of Abraham Lincoln as a masterly media manipulator.

Infusing his typically clear and well-reasoned discourse with modern-sounding language, Marcus presents Lincoln as an early adopter of new technology, being one of the first public figures to understand the power of photography and who “loved the camera” enough to leave over 100 surviving portraits. Based on a broad array of period illustrations, looking at six iconic photos taken in Matthew Brady’s Washington, D.C., studio on Feb. 9, 1864 (and, in greater focus, at one in particular), he offers a visually based overview of the 16th president’s political career—from the earliest likeness in 1846 and an 1860 Brady shot that boosted his first national campaign by going “viral” both as a carte de visite and “morphed” into a line engraving for Harper’s Weekly—on to post-assassination memorial images. (The author makes no mention of various and possibly spurious deathbed photos.) Aside from confusingly characterizing the Emancipation Proclamation as “a watershed moment in human history” a few pages after dubbing it just “a symbolic statement” like the finishing of the Capitol’s dome, Marcus offers readers deeply enlightening views of presidential achievements and daily routines, of the era’s unfinished and chaotic Washington, D.C., and of Brady and other artists who depicted the president in various media. Everyone in the pictures is White except in occasional racially mixed engravings of crowd scenes.

A fresh angle offering yet another reason to regard Lincoln as our presidential G.O.A.T.