W hat would you do if a total stranger called claiming he owned the earliest photograph of a U.S. president? For Sotheby’s Global Head of Photographs, Emily Bierman, she assumed it was a long shot. But as she followed the trail—an obscure family gift, a misidentified label, decoding century-old handwriting—the story started to unravel something far bigger: the oldest surviving photograph of an American president.
In this episode of Sotheby’s Stories, Emily takes us behind the scenes of how she solved a real-life art and history mystery that begins with a single phone call and leads to a historic revelation. How do you prove the impossible? And what happens when history resurfaces in the most unexpected place? And why are his socks so cute?
