Focus : Lincoln Photo Logs

A picture is worth a thousand words.

In the case of “Lincoln,” ABC’s new documentary on the 16th President, hundreds of vintage photographs speak volumes in the compelling, tragic story of Abraham Lincoln. The four-hour miniseries chronicles Lincoln’s life from his humble log cabin beginnings to his presidency during the Civil War to his assassination at Ford’s Theatre in 1865.

Lincoln first posed for a photographer in 1846 when he was just a clean-shaven country lawyer in Springfield, Ill. Over the next 19 years of his life, Lincoln was captured on film by such renowned photographers of the day as Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner.

“Probably closer than half (the photographs) were taken before he became president,” said Peter Kunhardt, the producer and director of “Lincoln,” which airs Saturday and next Sunday.

Although Lincoln didn’t like posing for photographers, Kunhardt said, ‘I can understand the number of photographs taken once he was president. I am surprised at the amount of pictures taken of him as a lawyer in Springfield. It was like photographers saw something so captivating in that face of his. They sought him out.”

The photographs featured in the documentary, which was written by Kunhardt’s father, Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., and his brother, Philip III, come from the renowned collection of Frederick Hill Meserve, Kunhardt’s great-grandfather. James Earl Jones narrates the documentary and Jason Robards speaks Lincoln’s own words culled from diaries, letters and other writings. Oscar-winning composer Alan Menken (“Beauty and the Beast,” “The Little Mermaid”) penned the music.

As a companion to the documentary, the Kunhardts have written “Lincoln: An Illustrated Biography” (Knopf, $50), a 432-page coffee table book with more than 700 photographs.

Kunhardt acknowledged there will be a lot of comparisons made between “Lincoln” and Ken Burns’ Emmy-winning 1990 PBS documentary series “The Civil War.” He said the two documentaries are different in style.

“Unlike ‘The Civil War,’ which used a lot of art work, we didn’t use paintings,” he said. “I tried to initially. But every time I looked at it, I thought I was sitting back in a school seat being lectured at by some teacher.”

Kunhardt, who previously worked on ABC’s “20/20” and “Our World,” approached the network about doing the documentary, the first ever done on Lincoln, after “The Civil War” aired in September, 1990.

Ted Harbert, an executive vice president at ABC, said the phenomenal success of “The Civil War” was part of the reason why ABC OKd a project so unusual for a commercial network.

“But it’s not like we are coming on the heels (of “The Civil War”),” Harbert said. “There wasn’t going to be the same battlefield stuff. It is a study of the man.”

Harbert said it would be great if “Lincoln” is a ratings success. But the network didn’t do the documentary with ratings in mind. “We know that our core business is series,” Harbert said. “But with 1,144 hours to program in prime time per year, I think we owe the audience some fraction of those hours dedicated to excellent high-quality programming which is not necessarily ratings driven.”

Producing “Lincoln” was a massive undertaking for the Kunhardts. “I became the person in charge of the pictures, putting them in order and coordinating with my brother and father, who were outlining the story themselves,” Peter Kunhardt said. “It was like folding a deck of cards. We would go back and forth and carefully coordinate what we could show with the stories we wanted to tell.”

Featured in the documentary are several candid photographs of Lincoln, including the only photograph taken of him at Gettysburg just before his delivery of the famed Gettysburg Address in 1863. “He is almost a different-looking man when he is unaware of the camera,” Kunhardt said.

In the the mid-19th Century, Kunhardt said, “The camera exposure was so long that (the subjects) had to sit frozen-faced for many seconds. That’s why (Lincoln) never smiled. Photographers didn’t want them to smile because they couldn’t sustain it for that time. It is why (Lincoln) always had that posed looked to himself.”

Kunhardt said that although the Meserve Collection contains some 10,000 photographs and other Lincoln memorabilia, the majority of pictures of Lincoln and the Civil War in general were destroyed after the war ended. “The Civil War had been a ghastly long affair,” he said. “(Americans) wanted to forget it. So the negatives of many of the pictures which were recorded were discarded or reused.”

All photographs used in the documentary and in the book are originals. “I felt very strongly I didn’t want to give the cameraman duplicates,” Kunhardt said. “We had a cameraman come to our production offices and everything was shot by hand. Thus, we could use these original first-generation pictures. That’s why they are so sharp. There is an intimacy there that comes out.”

“Lincoln” airs Saturday at 8 p.m. and Dec. 27 at 7 p.m. on ABC.