Iconic Photos

The above famous photoportrait of Abraham Lincoln has his head placed upon the photo of another politician, John C. Calhoun. The trickery is attributed to Thomas Hicks – a portrait painter from that era who had painted Lincoln before — who was thought to have created this composite in the early to mid-1860s. Many historians believed that the photo was created after Lincoln’s assassination because there were hardly any heroic, Presidential looking portraits of Lincoln at that time. Calhoun’s image is a wood cut while the image of Lincoln is detailed, because it was taken from Mathew Brady’s portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the same one later used for $5 bills.

In his haste, Hicks didn’t noticed that when he flipped the Brady photo, the President’s famous mole would appear on the wrong side of his face. It was only years later that Stefan Lorant, the art director for the London Picture Post magazine, noticed that the photo was a fake.

The irony was that John C. Calhoun, a former vice president of the Untied States, was a vocal figure on states rights, and an inspiration for the Southern secessionists, even though he died a decade before the Civil War. Calhoun was an outspoken proponent of slavery and talked about it as a “positive good”.