POTD: Lincoln's Craggy Face

From 2015 08 15 South Dakota

Today's photo-of-the-day is from Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It's a close-up of the face of Abraham Lincoln. According to a BBC story ("Abraham Lincoln: The enduring images"), Lincoln was the first president of the photographic era. Lincoln himself credited an iconic Matthew Brady photograph taken in early 1860 with making him president. It shows a clean-shaven, "sober, respectable, powerful intellectual who could become president." Four years later, another photograph tells a different story. "The Civil War was coming to an end and the enormous toll taken by four years of conflict is etched into the lines of Lincoln's craggy face." The granite of Mount Rushmore is the perfect medium to capture that Lincoln.