Conspirator's Portraits

[Dave Taylor]

Just to help relieve the tension I'm sensing in this thread, here's something that might help clarify things.

There are only two photographs of Mary Surratt. This one:



and this one:



The thing that Pamela has accurately noticed is that in most of the modern books and articles about the Lincoln assassination, Mary Surratt is shown like this:



Now, technically, this is the same photograph as the first one I posted. However, Mary Surratt's features have been softened a bit and, admittedly, she looks prettier in this image. I do not believe that this was done purposefully, however. Instead it is the result of the former method of duplicating a photo, which was to take another photo of it. In the same way that photocopying a photocopy results in a loss of contrast and detail, photographing a photograph causes you to lose details. The resulting duplicate is blurrier and the detailed lines are softened. Researchers would often photograph a photograph in order to duplicate it for their files. James O. Hall, for instance, did this often and there are many enevelopes in his files of photo duplicates returning to him from print shops and photography studios. Whenever Mary Surratt's portrait was called for in an article or book, the image would need to be duplicated and dispatched. Over time, the image was repeatedly duplicated from prior duplicates and eventually the fine details of the original photo were lost. This is why, today, original photographs or images are scanned in high resolution and turned into a digital file. These digital files will not lose detail when duplicated.

There's no conspiracy over the Mary Surratt photo. It's just that back in the 1970's - 1990's the methods of duplicating a photo resulted in a gradual loss of detail and authors and groups today are still unknowingly using these lower quality duplicates.