This could be the earliest known photograph of the 16th U.S. president, Abraham Lincoln, the man admired and emulated by the 44th U.S. president, Barack Obama.
The photograph has come to be known as the Kaplan Daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln, after Albert Kaplan who purchased it in 1977, receipted only as “Portrait of a Young Man†from an art gallery in New York.
In 1987 Kaplan had the image examined by Dr. Claude N. Frechette, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon in Paris, who concluded, “that the Abraham Lincoln of the early 1840s is, without the possibility of error, the very man of the Kaplan daguerreotype.â€
[Site: LincolnPortrait.com]