The "Lost Lincoln" Photograph

It's Not Abraham Lincoln

by Joelle Steele

Last night I watched a TV show called “Undiscovered: The Lost Lincoln,” in which an old ambrotype of a man was being analyzed to determine whether or not the man was a recently deceased Abraham Lincoln. The woman investigating this was Whitny Braun, an assistant professor of religion, bioethics, and public health ethics at Loma Linda University in Southern California.

Based largely on provenance, Braun is “99% sure” that the photograph of an unidentified man is of Lincoln. Harold Holzer, a leading authority on Lincoln and author of the book “The Lincoln Image,” which contains all 130 known Lincoln images, says the man in the ambrotype is not Lincoln. Me? I was just very surprised to see that this was a photo that I had already analyzed back in 2007 and determined was not Lincoln. At that time, a high resolution scan of the ambrotype had been emailed to me by a man named Howard Polaris. He did not make any claims to owning the photograph and only wanted to know if it could be a dying (not dead) Lincoln.

Unlike Braun, I rarely have occasion to ever consider provenance when it comes to comparing faces. I am an expert on face and ear identification. I have been analyzing and comparing faces and ears to authenticate identities of people in photographs since the mid-1970s. I am also an expert on Lincoln's face and ears, as I have compared more than 50 would-be Lincoln photographs to almost every known Lincoln image. I have a very well-trained eye for comparing faces, and I took one quick glance at the unidentified dying man and knew he was not Abraham Lincoln. It doesn't even look like Lincoln.

It always amazes me how people who are supposedly experts consistently fail to use correct and reliable methods to analyze and compare faces – and even more rarely the ears – in photographs. I learned how to immediately rule out non-matches from several well-respected experts, including Alfred V. Iannarelli, Leslie G. Farkaš, Ray Iwata, W.R. Stark, Clyde C. Snow, and Simon Fuchs. I still use the techniques they taught me to this day.

As a face anthropometrist, I measure faces and ears and compare them. The first thing I do when comparing faces in old photographs is to make sure that any damage to the questioned photograph is digitally removed. I do this under high magnification so that I can immediately tell if something is a wrinkle or a scratch on the photograph, or if a spot is a mole or mold. I also adjust the brightness and contrast to bring out the details so that when I measure the face from certain points or landmarks I will be able to clearly see the face details that will ensure accuracy.

The second step is to find a few suitable photographs for comparison, preferably ones in which the subject is roughly the same age and facing in the same direction. I used four different Lincoln images for comparison to the unidentified dying man, all with the same results.

The third step is to align the pupils and size the irises. This is extremely important, because the eye is the only part of the face that can be reliably used as a stable point of comparison. In other words, if the eyes are aligned and the irises are made the same size, then if two photographs are of the same person, everything in their faces should line up. If they do not line up, it cannot be the same person.

After aligning the pupils and sizing the irises, it was very easy to prove that the unidentified dying man was not Lincoln. The face proportions did not match at all. The dying man's head was far larger and longer, the nose alone being a full 25% longer. The dying man's forehead was almost 30% taller and was also much wider. The brow lines did not match. The philtrum (the space between the base of the nose and the tips of the lips) was tilted on the unidentified dying man's face.

But, the one thing I noticed immediately when I first saw the unidentified dying man was that his ear did not match either of Lincoln's, and I always look at both of Lincoln's ears when comparing to another face because his ears are different from each other, and I am never sure if a questioned antique photograph is laterally reversed or not. The ear was not even mentioned in “The Lost Lincoln” show – a gigantic oversight!

Lincoln's ears are very large and prominent, and the unidentified dying man's ear is not, and he does not have the distantly detached lobes that Lincoln does. The shape and pattern of the ear is also different than Lincoln's. Since ears are as unique as fingerprints, when they do not match, it is not the same person.

As for idiosyncratic characteristics, I do not usually pay much attention to these as they are generally irrelevant in most face and ear comparisons. However, in this case, the wrinkle patterns between the unidentified dying man's brows do not match Lincoln's, and wrinkles tend to remain on a face long after death, even once the body has bloated. In general, the unidentified dying man's face has very few wrinkles and Lincoln had a ton of them. The beards and hair do not match either. Lincoln's beard is always short and his hair straight. The unidentified dying man's hair is obviously curly and his beard is also curly and is far longer and lighter in color than in any photographs of Lincoln.

In the TV show, Braun consults a face recognition firm to try to match the unidentified dying man with known images of Lincoln from a database of other Lincoln photographs and photographs of non-Lincoln faces. I have said it before – many times – that face recognition software always fails miserably at these kinds of comparisons, and this software also failed. Face recognition software simply does not adequately prepare photos for comparison. No alignment of pupils or sizing of irises. This incredibly simple step is the very best way to immediately rule out the non-matches, and in this case, they do just that. The unidentified dying man is not, and cannot be, Abraham Lincoln, not alive, not dying, and not deceased.