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Photo Identification in the News

By Maureen A. Taylor

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Readers of this column will be as fascinated as I was with these two articles on photo identification.

In the January 2010 issue of Smithsonian Magazine is the story of an unidentified daguerreotype owned by Jack and Beverly Wilgus. In it a handsome young man stands facing the camera holding a long metal rod. One of his eyes is closed shut. The collectors thought he held a harpoon until they posted their image on the social networking image site Flickr. It wasn’t long before they heard from someone who said it wasn’t a harpoon and was possibly Phineas Gage. Gage’s life could have been featured on a reality TV trauma show. In 1848, when 25, Gage’s life changed. An accident on the job sent a 43 inch tamping iron through his skull. He lived to talk about it and was conscious when the doctor arrived on the scene. You can read about Gage’s life and the story of this daguerreotype online. In the photo he’s holding the rod that’s engraved as a souvenir of the event.

Spring training is weeks away but for readers that are baseball fans, you’ll get a jump start on the fun. A colleague sent me his 2004 issue of The Baseball Research Journal because it featured an article on identifying baseball images. I’m no sports fan, but I loved author George Michael’s descriptions of how he sees the clues in photos of players sliding into base. You can order copies of the Journal through the Society of American Baseball Research.

Both of these articles will end up in my files.

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