The Dark Story Behind Edgar Allan Poe’s Most Famous Photograph, Taken Four Days After a Laudanum Overdose

In the Hal­loween sea­son, one Amer­i­can writer comes to mind more often than any oth­er: Edgar Allan Poe. That owes in large part to his famous­ly macabre tales like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amon­til­la­do,” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” writ­ten though they may have been with bare­ly con­cealed con­tempt for their sen­sa­tion-seek­ing mag­a­zine read­er­ship. But it also has to do with the image of the man him­self. Or rather, it has to do with one image in par­tic­u­lar: a daguerreo­type pho­to­graph tak­en on Novem­ber 9, 1848, at a Prov­i­dence stu­dio that has inspired prac­ti­cal­ly every rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Poe in pop­u­lar cul­ture since.

Known as Ulti­ma Thule, this famous por­trait was in fact just one of per­haps ten daguerreo­types for which Poe sat in his life­time. Inven­tor Louis Daguer­re’s ear­ly pho­to­graph­ic process, which used sil­ver-coat­ed cop­per plates, fas­ci­nat­ed Poe, who in an 1840 news­pa­per arti­cle called it “the most impor­tant, and per­haps the most extra­or­di­nary tri­umph of mod­ern sci­ence.” He described its prod­uct as “infi­nite­ly more accu­rate in its rep­re­sen­ta­tion than any paint­ing by human hands,” though any­one sit­ting for a pic­ture did have to sit still for min­utes on end, result­ing in not just the unsmil­ing vis­ages we asso­ciate with nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry pho­tog­ra­phy, but also in a com­bi­na­tion of dis­com­fort and slight blur­ring that can look vague­ly oth­er­world­ly.

That qual­i­ty may actu­al­ly have enhanced the aura of Ulti­ma Thule, which painter Michael J. Deas calls “the image of the trag­ic roman­tic poet: solemn, detached, con­sumed by his own wild­ly self-destruc­tive nature.” It sure­ly also made a dif­fer­ence that the por­trait was made, in the words of poet Her­vey Allen, “prob­a­bly at the very hour when he looked the worst that he had ever looked in his life.” He’d been tak­en to the stu­dio by a stranger with whom he’d spent the pre­vi­ous night binge-drink­ing. Just four days before that, he’d unsuc­cess­ful­ly attempt­ed sui­cide by lau­danum over­dose, a rash action tak­en after the rejec­tion of his mar­riage pro­pos­al by Sarah Helen Whit­man, a wid­owed poet he had­n’t known long — and who would give her suit­or’s immor­tal por­trait its Latin name, bor­rowed from his poem “Dream-Land.”

The orig­i­nal daguerreo­type, for which the stu­dio prob­a­bly paid the by-then notable, still per­pet­u­al­ly hard-up Poe to sit, remained with its mak­ers until it van­ished around 1860, and its where­abouts have remained unknown ever since. But copies have allowed gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of read­ers to behold Poe’s trou­bled vis­age when what Whit­man called “all the stormy grandeur of that via Dolorosa had left its sullen shad­ow on his brow.” Through the drunk­en chaos and pover­ty of his life, the writer him­self could see things to come. “The con­se­quences of any new sci­en­tif­ic inven­tion will, at the present day exceed, by very much, the wildest expec­ta­tions of the most imag­i­na­tive,” he wrote, an obser­va­tion true enough of pho­tog­ra­phy 178 years ago, and no doubt even truer of what we use to make images today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Iggy Pop Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ry, “The Tell-Tale Heart”

Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe? An Ani­mat­ed Video Explains

The Mys­tery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death: 19 The­o­ries on What Caused the Poet’s Demise

Hear Edgar Allan Poe Sto­ries Read by Iggy Pop, Jeff Buck­ley, Christo­pher Walken, Mar­i­anne Faith­ful & More

7 Tips from Edgar Allan Poe on How to Write Vivid Sto­ries & Poems

The First Pho­to­graph of a Human Being: A Pho­to Tak­en by Louis Daguerre in 1838

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.