Figure 1 – The last formal photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken on February 5, 1865 by Alexander Gardner. From the US LOC and in the public domain.

Today is April 15th.  Yesterday I posted two images taken on April 14th – the second was on April 14t, 1865. This is a black day in American history because on April 15, 1865 – a day after the second image President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth of the then famous Booth family of actors. He died at 7.22 on the morning of April 15, 1865.

So my pictures of today were both taken by Alexander Gardener, one of the great Civil War photographers, and a rival of Mathew Brady.  Figure 1 shows Gardner’s “Last formal picture of Abraham Lincoln” and was taken on February 5, 1865.  Figure to is Gardner’s portrait of the famous (now infamous) actor John Wilkes Booth taken on an unknown date also in 1865.

The two images in a sense represent polar extremes – extremes of political thought certainly.  The camera in a way fails us.  It does not allow us to really see, and only to speculate in retrospect with knowledge of who the sitters were, into the tormented souls of these two men – Lincoln tormented by the heavy responsibility for so man deaths and Booth tormented by the lost cause of his beloved South.

Lincoln, as we know, had a premonition of his own death.  It was as if his worldly task was to save the Union and with that accomplished the fates discarded him.

Figure 2 – John Wilkes Booth Figure 1 – The last formal photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken in 1865 by Alexander Gardner. From the US LOC and in the public domain.

“About 10 days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for
important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed
when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream.
There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued
sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed
and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same
pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to
room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of
distress met me as I passed along. I saw light in all the rooms; every
object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were
grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What
could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a
state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived
at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque,  on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered,
others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded
of one of the soldiers, ‘The President,’ was his answer; ‘he was killed
by an assassin.’ Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which
woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was
only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.^[12]

Yesterday, I found a thought-provoking photo series on MSN showing professions that no longer exist. They call it “Extinct Jobs.” When I was in high school, my father had a colleague who liked to photograph scenes in New York City that were likely to soon vanish.  It is a worthwhile endeavor, and this is an example of such work, albeit not by a single person.  With regards to our own times it is truly amazing how fast things have changed.  I suspect that we would not have predicted witnessing such rapid technological and indeed, sociological change in our lifetimes.

As for this series there are a number that catch my eye and mind in particular.  We have, of course, the telephone operator.  Try to reach a living person today.  But there are quainter(?) lost professions. In this context, I think that quainter means more antiquated and beyond the common memory.  So how about the “Knocker-up” of 1920’s London.  No it doesn’t mean that.  The knocker up was a man whose job it was to carry a long stick and knock on the windows of people who had to get up early.  He was a human alarm clock. Then there is the “rat catcher,” whose job it was to catch and kill rats in English train stations.  The image was taken on November 7, 1939.  But the image that seems most distant and raises the hairs on the back of my neck is the “London gas-lamp lighter.”  The image is from 1935.  But what it evokes, in the cobwebs of my mind, is almost exactly exactly a century old (August 3, 1914).  On the eve of World War I, Sir Edward Grey, British foreign secretary, is said to have remarked that “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”  There is some controversy as to whether Sir Grey actually said this.  However, both this series of photographs and those words emphasize a profound truth: that the events of human history can offer up profound change.

First, we had “Dancing with Wolves.” Then there was “Swimming with sharks.”  And now the latest “Jumpin’ with meteors.” Oh BTW for you shark fans, “Sharknado II” is scheduled to be released in July.  But I digress – could not resist this story.  It seems that two years ago Norweigian sky diver, Anders Helstrup, went jumping in, or above, Hedmark, Norway and was almost hit by a meteor while parachuting and the best part is that he caught it all with his helmet cameras.    So we get both this cool still frame, with the meteor caught in multiple positions on its path and even a great video of the whole event. The meteor was in what is referred to as its “dark flight” when it has slowed and cooled down sufficiently not to be glowing. It is estimated that the meteor was a few meters from Helstrup and weighed about 5 Kg. Technically it doesn’t become a meteorite until it hits the ground.  Hitting a sky diver apparently does not count!

This, needless-to-say, kind of begs the question why Helstrup has waited two years before releasing the images.  The answer is that they were trying to keep it all hush hush while they searched, apparently unsuccessfully so far for the meteorite. Rocks falling from the sky?  The odds against this are, well, astronomical. And that’s lucky for Helstrup who probably would have been cut in half by the encounter if it had occurred.