Images of Spencer W. Kimball
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View the PDF download to see these photographs.
Introduction to Historic Nauvoo
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Commerce was a near-wilderness when Joseph Smith brought his followers there in 1839. They had been driven from their prosperous settlements in Missouri by violent frontier mobs suspicious of the Saints’ religion and New England antislavery background and fearful of their sympathy for the Indians, their rapid growth, and their unified voting power. Appeals by the Saints to the Missouri governor had brought an order to leave the state or face extermination.
Here they hoped to find peace. Joseph named the land they had purchased “Nauvoo,” which he said was from the Hebrew meaning “a beautiful place, connoting rest.” In spite of poverty and recurring bouts of malaria, they drained the swampy land, planted crops, and began to build a city. In six years, Nauvoo became one of the two largest cities in Illinois, a close rival of Chicago.
The state legislature granted the Saints a city charter. (A young legislator named Abraham Lincoln voted for it.) It gave Nauvoo the right to have a university, an independent judiciary, and a unit of the state militia. Soon it had all three, and the people felt safe in their rapidly growing city. Converts came from the East and the South, from England and Canada. No one thought about the comment Heber C. Kimball had made when he first saw the town site: “‘It’s a very pretty place, but not long abiding home for the saints.'”
The Holy Land
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The photos of the Holy Land presented in this article were mostly taken about 1926. The collection is designed to help readers visualize the Holy Land as it was anciently, before modern developments changed the landscape forever. Twenty-six black-and-white photos show scenes of Bethlehem, Nazareth, Bethany, Jerusalem, and more. Scenes are arranged as a journey through the life of Jesus Christ and include the Mount of Olives, Golgotha, and the Garden Tomb. Several scenes show Jews and Palestinians in premodern clothing working, gathering, and tending animals. Most of the photos are selections from the book Palestine and Syria: The Country, the People, and the Landscape, by Karl Grober.
An Original Daguerreotype of Oliver Cowdery Identified
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During my graduate studies I took on the project of obtaining photographic images of each apostle of this dispensation. The task proved difficult, but I found photographic likeness for all but seven members of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My interest in collecting daguerreotypes has continued since that day, and it has led me to the discovery of what I believe is an original daguerreotype of Oliver Cowdery.
One criterion for authenticating an image is to see if the clothing fashions worn in the photo correspond to the person’s age in that time period. Many websites have viewable copies of daguerreotypes. One of the best sites to find photographs of early clothing styles is the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. On the evening of February 6, 2006, I was studying images thought to contain 1840s clothing styles, when daguerreotype 1363 (fig. 1) came up. This original daguerreotype, located at the Library of Congress Archives in Washington, D.C., was entitled “Unidentified man, half-length portrait, with arm resting on table with tablecloth.” There were also more facts about the daguerreotype on the information page. I surmised that the portrait may contain the image of Oliver Cowdery. As I gave more consideration to this newly discovered image over the next few days, I decided to do a preliminary comparison between the image and other likenesses of Oliver Cowdery.
Three books on visual images in the history of the Church [2]
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One does not have to read E. H. Gombrich on art and illusion1 to realize that any picture is inevitably a choice: the photographer or painter chooses what goes within the frame and, beyond that, chooses what to highlight—the expression on human faces, even the time of day, light and darkness. And the artist also chooses from a range of stylistic possibilities, including a kind of photographic realism, impressionism, expressionism, various symbolic and fantasy combinations, and of course different degrees of abstraction. When visual works are compiled into a book or an exhibit, drawing from a large pool of potential candidates, again there is selection.
Gallery Display
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A display of books, manuscripts, photographs, and artifacts was assembled to accompany “The Worlds of Joseph Smith” conference at the Library of Congress. Twelve items in this display came from collections in the Library of Congress; three from the Library-Archives of the Community of Christ in Independence, Missouri; two from the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah; and thirteen from the LDS Church History Library, Archives, and Museum of Church History and Art in Salt Lake City.
Three books on visual images in the history of the Church [1]
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Much of today’s visual experience is vicarious—mediated through films, television, videos, and reproduced photographs in printed materials. Visual images reproduced in media as a source of information are both entertaining and enlightening, often providing multiple layers of information–particularly when coupled with text material such as a caption. The viewer’s experience of the image may be informed as much by the caption as by the details within the image itself. Roland Barthes, a cultural historian, argues that the text may simply amplify a set of connotations already given in the visual image or it may produce an entirely new significance that is retroactively projected into the image, so much so as to appear denoted there.
A Superlative Image
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In July 2005, the Deseret Morning News in Salt Lake City published a story with the punning headline “Old Young Photo donated to BYU.” Even though Mark and Suzanne Richards had donated the rare 1850s daguerreotype of Brigham Young to BYU in December 2004, the donation did not draw media attention until just days before the July 24 pioneer holiday in Utah. For historians, especially photographic historians, the story was compelling—one of those rare moments when something thought to have vanished suddenly reappears. It was known that this particular precious daguerreotype has been created because a later photographic copy of it existed and had been printed in 1936. However, researchers feared that the original had been lost—a victim of the ravage of time. The numerous news stories provided the public, the large extended Young family, and historians a sense of satisfaction that this priceless treasure from the past had found its way into an institutional repository where professional preservation methods could ensure its longevity.
Church History in Black and White
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A photo essay on the birth of Mormonism, produced in 1907–8, is the crowning achievement of one of the LDS Church’s most artistic photographers, George Edward Anderson, an obscure village photographer from Springville, Utah (1860–1928). Church History in Black and White brings together for the first time the words and pictures of the photographer’s year-long odyssey to document Church historical sites in the eastern United States. Anderson’s work has been rediscovered by photographers, artists, and scholars in recent years, and I am delighted to see another publication of these magnificent photographs.
Anderson had an uncanny obsession to tell stories with his camera. He was a photojournalist ahead of his time. Before the turn of the century; he had documented construction of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad through Utah, the lives of miners in Carbon and Emery counties, and the Scofield Mine Disaster of 1900. In his travels with a portable gallery throughout rural central Utah, he documented the lifestyles of his beloved Mormon people. But the most ambitious project of all began when he was called on a mission to England in 1907. On his way east, he decided to make nearly a year of detours to document the roots and historical sites of his church in Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania and Vermont. These photographic detours were not part of an official Church mission, although some ecclesiastical leaders did give their blessings and verbal permissions for the stops along the way.
A Long-Awaited Visit
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In 1937, just two years before Hitler invaded Poland, President Heber J. Grant made a memorable journey from Salt Lake City to Europe (fig. 1). President Grant had served as president of the European and British Missions from 1903 to 1906 and was now returning to Europe as prophet of the Church. He was the second Church President to visit Europe while serving in that capacity. His predecessor, Joseph F. Smith, visited Europe in 1906 and again in 1910.
Although the close succession of President Smith’s two visits probably raised hopes among the European Saints that such frequent visits would continue, circumstances prevented any Church President from traveling to Europe again until 1937. The worldwide depression, for example, had forced President Grant to concentrate his efforts on saving the Church and its members from economic catastrophe while maintaining the Church’s missionary effort, temple work, and daily affairs.
