Lincoln, Unexposed

To my eyes, this is one of the four or five greatest and most moving photographs ever taken of a human being. How much of its power is from the image, and how much from the knowledge we bring to it, is hard to say.

There are some misconceptions about the picture. First, what you see is a print on paper, not a glass plate. The glass plate is long gone. Second, Gardner didn't drop the plate. If he had, it would be in a thousand pieces. Almost certainly what he did was twist it slightly by mistake, breaking it in two along a single crack. He put the pieces together and made a print. Whether he made more than one nobody knows. But only one exists.

The crack (which is rendered so crisply that it appears to be an indentation in the paper) both records and predicts. It symbolizes the broken country that Lincoln restored to unity but whose wound he couldn't erase. It portends the violent, veering trajectory of the bullet that would kill him.

But the crack is only part of the story.

Lincoln's face is careworn, his expression one of seemingly infinite patience. Some think he has a Mona Lisa smile. He is seated off-center and the light-sepia background is blank. The pose is intermediate between a conventional portrait and a half-body view.

Furthermore, Gardner's camera catches only Lincoln's lips, beard and part of his nose in focus. The far shoulder is a featureless blur. His ear -- oversize, attentive -- is indistinct. Even his left eye, which is as deep and complex as the vortex that took the Pequod down, isn't quite sharp.

The impression is of Lincoln receding from present tasks into history.

When Ward looks at the picture, he thinks of an image from the last page of another American novel, not "Moby-Dick" but "The Great Gatsby."

"Lincoln is moving out across 'the dark fields of the republic.' We are always trying to seek him. And yet he is elusive to us."

This photograph is an American treasure. Like Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence (which recently went off view at the Library of Congress), it's delicate and needs long rests. It's not out of the drawer much.

"The Mask of Lincoln" will be up through July 5, 2009, but the original print of Gardner's photograph will be on display only through Lincoln's birthday, Feb. 12. (After that, a replica.)

Go see it and be thankful for many things.