Your Evening Reading

Slog tipper leek would like everyone to look over at the New York Times, where the always-great Errol Morris does a five-part investigation titled “Whose Father Was He?”

The soldier’s body was found near the center of Gettysburg with no identification — no regimental numbers on his cap, no corps badge on his jacket, no letters, no diary. Nothing save for an ambrotype (an early type of photograph popular in the late 1850s and 1860s) of three small children clutched in his hand. Within a few days the ambrotype came into the possession of Benjamin Schriver, a tavern keeper in the small town of Graeffenburg, about 13 miles west of Gettysburg. The details of how Schriver came into possession of the ambrotype have been lost to history. But the rest of the story survives, a story in which this photograph of three small children was used for both good and wicked purposes.

We’re only on day two of the story, but it looks to be vintage Morris: It’s about families, and images, and our relationships to images and families. It’s also something ideally suited to blogs, with its heavy interrelation between written words and pictures. I hope more people start following Morris’s lead and working on longer explorations like this. Part two is here. Many thanks to leek for sharing this with Slog.