Ephemeral Beauty

Edwin Hale Lincoln (1848¿1938) served as a drummer boy in the Civil War and later became a national leader of Civil War veterans. He began photographing in Boston around 1874, documenting yacht races and the extravagant summer homes of the Gilded Age in the 1880s. Lincoln¿s photographs were awarded numerous medals at photographic exhibitions (including one that put him on a par with a young Alfred Stieglitz in 1891), but two years later he stopped exhibiting and moved to western Massachusetts. There Lincoln photographed ancient trees and endangered wildflowers and orchids, which he self-published in elegant volumes of mounted platinum prints. His photographs have been printed in many books and magazines, among them Gustav Stickley¿s The Craftsman.