Solving the Mystery of Joseph Smith's Alleged Photograph: Curtis Weber's Story - Latter-Day Lights

Could a single photograph strengthen your testimony of the Restoration?

For years, countless images have claimed to be authentic photographs of the Prophet Joseph Smith—but none have been universally accepted. So what happens when a long-forgotten daguerreotype is discovered in a family heirloom, and the evidence begins pointing in an unexpected direction?

In this fascinating episode of Latter-Day Lights, researcher Curtis Weber shares how his initial attempt to disprove the image's authenticity led him down a years-long journey through forensic anthropology, historical records, facial analysis, and Church history.

Join us as Curtis unpacks the remarkable research behind what may be the strongest case yet for an authentic photograph of Joseph Smith. Along the way, you'll discover how careful investigation, expert collaboration, and an honest pursuit of truth can deepen faith and offer a fresh appreciation for the life and legacy of the Prophet of the Restoration.

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Transcript

“Faith to Stay” by Scott Brandley

Scott Brandley 0:00

Hey there, as a Latter Day Lights listener, I want to give you a very special gift today. My brand new book, Faith to Stay. This book is filled with inspiring stories, powerful discoveries, and even fresh insights to help strengthen your faith during the storms of life. So if you're looking to be inspired, uplifted, and spiritually recharged, just visit faith2stay.com. Now, let's get back to the show. Hey everyone, I'm Scott

Intro

Scott Brandley 0:30

Brandley. Every member of the church has a story to share, one that can instill faith, invite hope, and inspire others. On today's episode, we're going to hear how one man made it his personal mission to disprove the authenticity of a long-lost photo of Joseph Smith and the incredible discoveries he made along the way that helped to prove its authenticity instead. Welcome to Latter Day Lights.

Welcoming Curtis Weber to the show

Scott Brandley 1:05

So glad you're here with us today. I'm really excited to introduce my special guest, Curtis Weber, to the show. Welcome, Curtis.

Curtis Weber 1:13

Thank you, Scott.

Scott Brandley 1:15

Yeah, man. This is so exciting. So Curtis and I met um two weeks ago at what would you call it? A symposium? I don't know what you'd call it.

Curtis Weber 1:26

A little mini conference or symposium for the Bruce Burke.

Scott Brandley 1:30

Yeah, so um I when I went there, honestly, Curtis, I didn't really know a lot about it. My uncle had got us tickets, but it was we knew it was about something about Joseph Smith and a photograph that had been found. And it was an incredible day. And it's this documentary that's coming out later this year about this photograph that that was found. It was actually a Derogotype. Uh Daguerotype. Daguerotype. Yeah, that's a weird name, right? A daguerotype uh found in a locket from an ancestor of Joseph Smith um a few years ago. And it unlocked a ton of research and and interest in this photo because the way it was found and um you know some of the some of the the things that were discovered about it um is fascinating. And and that's how we met, because you were at this at this event. Um and I mean, I've just been so excited since then to talk to you more about it because we only got to talk for a few minutes at that conference. But the things you showed us were just incredible. So um we're gonna jump into a ton of research that Curtis has done um about this particular photograph of Joseph Smith. And I man, that's this is gonna blow your mind. So um, but before we jump into that,

Curtis in a nutshell

Scott Brandley 3:15

Curtis, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, my friend?

Curtis Weber 3:18

Lifelong member of the church, grew up in the covenant, uh served a mission, came back and went to BYU, got married, ended up uh staying here in Utah and raising my family here. And and one of my hobbies over the last uh you know 30 plus years of my life has been Joseph Smith research as an amateur, uh someone just very deeply interested in early church history and doctrine. And uh I'll I'll get more into the story of how I got involved in Joseph Smith forensics, but um it's my interest in Joseph Smith that led me directly into that field.

Scott Brandley 3:51

That is so awesome. So, and just a cool side note, um, before we got on the podcast, I mentioned your background photo is actually a picture of the Sacred Grove. And my great-great-grandpa, George Edward Anderson, took that photograph. So that's amazing. That's that's pretty cool. But uh yeah, so back to Joseph Smith's. So tell how did you get interested in Joe Joseph Smith? Like what's the interest

How Curtis got interested in Joseph Smith

Scott Brandley 4:20

there that you've had?

Curtis Weber 4:21

Um, you know, that's a good question. I I recall as a teenager not being particularly interested in religion or particularly spiritually minded, shall we say, but still I always had the testimony of the prophet Joseph Smith. And for some reason I believed his story and was always fascinated by learning about his life and his teachings. And I I would go and sneak my mom's copy of Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, the old blue covered paperback version from Desert Book, and I would read that at night in my my bedroom as a teenager, and my mom would always be like, Where who has my who stole my book? You know, and she'd find it in there in my bedroom. And uh, I still have that book. She actually gave it to me. I I took it so many times that she ended up just writing my name in the front inside cover and and gave it to me as a gift and bought herself her own copy or a new copy. Um but uh throughout my life and throughout my mission and afterwards, I've I've just been more and more fascinated by the life and and mission of the prophet Joseph Smith. And and I honestly can't tell you where that comes from, other than maybe something from the premortal life. Uh just something that I've latched onto early on in life and and have never let go.

Scott Brandley 5:33

Well, how now we get to this to this finding of this locket, this photo, and uh I think that's kind of where your story begins, right?

Curtis Weber 5:42

So yeah, go ahead and and share the screen here. I'm gonna back up just a little bit and talk about um my introduction

The history of the documentation of Joseph Smith & Hyrum

Curtis Weber 5:50

to this topic because uh there are a number of purported photos of the prophet Joseph Smith in existence, and this slide shows just a handful of them. And I did not particularly care or wonder or worry about this topic at all until uh I was approached by a good friend of mine uh about uh one of these particular photos. Um, but it was important to understand that my starting point and the point for all of us should be that there is no uh purported photograph of the prophet that's ever been authenticated. And in fact, there is no contemporary documentation contemporary to his lifetime, or shortly thereafter, I should say, uh, that he had ever been photographed. And uh I knew those things about it, but I have a really good friend and mentor, Andrew uh F. Ehat, who uh is a world-leading expert in the life and mission and teachings of the prophet Joseph Smith. And Andrew was approached by someone who thought they had discovered a picture of Joseph and told us they were trying to acquire it. And when we first got uh introduced to this whole uh story, uh we were provided with a very low-resolution copy of the daguerreotype that was cropped. You can see it here on the left side of the screen. And I immediately went to work uh trying to figure out how we could forensically test a picture. It wasn't something I have any professional training or university education in. So I started as a pure, straight-up amateur trying to figure out how we could possibly authenticate or at least test the claim of some purported picture of someone from the past. And it turned out that to make a kind of a long story short, this was a wild goose chase, even though in low resolution it came very close to matching in many respects. Uh, there are things here that that don't line up. And once we had a high-resolution image uh of the man in the daguerreotype, we could tell that it didn't match uh Joseph's anatomy. And in fact, it's a known daguerreotype in the Library of Congress. This person wasn't going to be buying it. Uh, the person's name, Stuart, Alexander Hugh Holmes Stewart, his last name is etched into the corner of the plate in the uncropped image. And so very, very quickly, after about 30 days and getting the, you know, 30 days with the low resolution, as soon as we received the high resolution, it was pretty obvious that it didn't match his face and that it was actually a known person. But yeah, but even though that was kind of a wild goose chase and and you would think that that would be uh disillusioning, I really dove deeply into the fascinating world of how you could forensically test such a claim. And of the many topics and and areas of research that I started privately studying, uh, I became aware of something that I had not ever heard of before, and that is that the bodies of Joseph and Hiram had been buried and then exhumed and reburied multiple times. In fact, probably at least five times, uh, we have little indications. We don't know for certain, and there's only you know little hints and clues, uh, usually late recollections of someone who knew something about it, usually a family member like Joseph F. Smith or or others. Um, but pretty certain that there's probably uh good evidence, pretty there's pretty good evidence, I should say, that they were buried at least five times. Um now in 2008, when my friend was approached about that purported photo, I did not know, but I learned of the fact that in 1994, three researchers from the Community of Christ Church or the R. LDS Church at the time, uh, had proposed that the remains of Joseph and Hiram had been misidentified in 1928, which was the last time they were uh dug up, identified, and exhumed and then reinterred. And then I learned of uh a man named Shannon Tracy who had led efforts in publishing two books, one that uh had come out in 1995, and then another that was just about to be published in early 2008, in which he uh purported to show evidence supporting this idea that the bodies had been misidentified. And I at the same time I met uh an artist and sculptor named DJ Baden, who had been creating likenesses of Hyerman Joseph since the late 1970s, and he had done his own forensic work uh using the 1928 skull photographs and measurements and the death mask and his knowledge of uh anatomy to show how, in fact, the skulls had not been misidentified in 1928, even producing these forensic drawings. There's many more than this, but a series of forensic drawings of both Joseph and Hiram. And I looked at both sides of the claim, and here I was in February 2008, and I didn't feel convinced by either study I could see potential flaws in the methodology and the rigor of both sets of claims, and so I thought, how in the world is it that it's the year 2008 and we don't know for certain where Joseph Smith is buried? So I took it upon myself to study the feasibility of conducting my own uh examination of the question and determined that I think I could add something to the story. And so I took the existing primary sources that one would need to engage in the study, and I added uh deep studies of facial anatomy and specifically tissue depth uh studies. And I published that article in 2009. It's available for free from uh uh what's now called the Ensign Peak Foundation, and uh in that research, what I did is I took, I obtained permission from the Church History Museum to photograph the two oldest known sets of death masks of Hieron and Joseph, and I would position them in this custom uh designed and built rig. And then I would simply document by moving each mask one degree left or right, tilt the pitch left or right, uh, you know, and then relative to a fixed position camera, documenting each angle. These were back in the days when 3D software and 3D scanners were quite expensive, and there was no way I was going to be able to do this with the money and skills I had. So what I decided to do was try to do it the old school method, one photograph at a time. I ended taking over 740 photographs of the masks at different angles. Uh I you could say I got a little crazy and a little little neck deep into the topic.

Scott Brandley 12:24

And then it's cool that the church would let you do that.

Curtis Weber 12:27

Oh, I I was stunned that they would let nobody, you know. I walked in with a letter of recommendation from someone who I had barely known who said, Hey, this guy's doing some research. You should listen to his request. I talked to a museum curator for about five minutes. He says, Okay, well, let's go talk to uh to uh um the conservator and see what they think of your plan. And he asked me a few questions, made a few suggestions for the rig design, uh, some uh additions and changes, and then they approved it. Uh yeah, literally like 30 minutes later, I'm walking out of the church history museum with approval to photograph the two oldest known sets of masks. That was quite exciting. Yeah. I took those photographs and then using again published tissue depth studies, I sought to find the best anatomical fit of each mask, each of the four masks, and I'll talk about those a little bit more over each of the uh lateral view uh photographs of the two skulls. And using that methodology, I was able to come to the conclusion that in fact Hiram and Joseph's bodies had been correctly identified in 1928. Now, there's been some uh research, and you we saw a little tiny bit of it at that conference that does call my conclusion into question, and that's uh from in my mind a more of an open question that needs more investigation. And I've done some additional work using the 3D models of the death masks that the Church History Department has uh made available to the public, and I won't go into that today because it's not exactly uh uh you know pertinent to our question about photographs. But what is very important to understand is something

The history and reliability of the Dibble masks

Curtis Weber 14:05

that I deeply went into, and that's the history of the masks and the reliability of the masks. Now, many people will have been to the Church History Museum and have seen or seen articles about the Dibble masks. They're the ones that are on display. The one on the left here is of Joseph. Um the Dibble masks are believed to be older, probably possibly even first generation casts from the original molds that were made on the faces of Hiram and Joseph the day after they were killed. So they're killed in Carthage jail in the evening around 516. Uh they arrived, their bodies arrived back in Nauvoo the next day on Friday, the the 28th of June 1844, around 2 to 2.30 in the afternoon. There would have been uh some preparation of the body to allow the family members to come in and see them. And then after the families had spent some time mourning with the bodies, they would have been excused, and then the work for preparing for the funeral, including the making of death mask molds, would have commenced. So we're looking we're talking probably no earlier than 20, 22 to 24 hours after death, they would have started making the death mask molds. Um the second mask on the right is the pedestal mask, and it's believed to be an early copy, possibly made uh in 1849, if not earlier, for John Taylor. We believe that these were the masks, the pedestal masks, or the ones that John Taylor took with him on a mission to Europe uh in 1849. Now, the reason I've used both in my research is that the Dibble masks have uh received some damage. Here you can see the missing hair evidence in the Dibble mask that is present in the later copy, the 1849 or circle and 49 copy of the mask. And on top of that, the varnish, that brown and tan texture, that kind of mottled appearance, uh that makes it hard to see some of the shape sometimes. And so I initially was using a lot of the pedestal mask uh photographs that I had taken in my research. But because the Dibble mask is older uh and has finer detail, especially in the eyebrows and the eyes, the eyelids and the nostrils and the lips, uh, it's forensically more significant. It's closer to Joseph's face chronologically than the pedestal mask. Now, this is an important point. A lot of people wonder you know, this is a death mask, and Joseph had a violent death. Um, is it reliable? What can we say about the the reliability of the death mask? In fact, some people so go so far as to say it's completely unreliable, especially because his face had suffered severe trauma, causing the lower facial bones to fracture and sag, and even for his chin to therefore recede in death. Um and I I call this the elongated mask hypothesis. It's not the official name, but that's what I call it. And uh it was created by people who are seeking to explain why their favorite purported photo of Joseph Smith doesn't match the proportions of the death mask, right? If it doesn't match the mask, then you have to say the mask is wrong somehow. And the only thing I can say about this is that this is simply demonstrably false. And it's really a straightforward uh uh situation. Joseph sat to have his profile traced by a folk artist named Sutcliffe Modsley, who was a uh a calico printmaker uh convert from England who moves to Nauvoo and actually lives on the Smith lot. And he's selected to create a profile tracing and then to create these little miniature drawings of the prophet, specifically this one that you see on the screen, which was created from that initial profile drawing. And while we don't have that original profile tracing, you can simply take any of the Monsleys, but especially this first one, and you can trace the profile of his drawing, and you can compare it directly to the profile of the death masks. And I I don't know if this is large enough for you to see on your screen very clearly, but it's a near-perfect match. The forehead slope, the size of the nose, the relationship of the nose to the lips and the lips to the chin. There's nothing wrong with the facial, at least the vertical profile or vertical spacing of facial features and the profile shape of the death mask. Now, that's not to say that the death mask didn't capture distortions to Joseph's face. There's at least two things that could be distorting his face in the mask. One is the fact that he's dead and the body begins to swell, and there's even slippage of skin and specifically facial tissues, anywhere from between 18 to 36 hours following death, and we're right in the middle of that window at about at about 22 to 24 hours at a minimum when the death mask mold was being made. And then the the weight of the plaster also distorts the face a little bit. And there's a whole line of research that uh this team that we went to the conference uh has done on life masks and death masks to talk about some of those deformations. But at least we can have some reliability, uh some confidence in the profile shape and again the vertical spacing of facial features. So that's an important background, uh, Scott,

What are daguerreotypes and how are they made?

Curtis Weber 19:15

to jumping into this question of this purported photograph. And uh as you pointed out, daguerreotypes, first of all, it's a it's not a common word that we uh use or hear a lot. So let me talk a little bit about what a daguerreotype is first. Uh it's the first form of photography. It was introduced into the world in August of 1839. Frenchman Louis Daguerre uh had been working on trying to discover a photographic process. They weren't, they weren't calling it that, uh, so they didn't use the word photograph yet, but they called them daguerreotypes after their inventor. And basically a daguerreotype is a plate of metal, usually copper, that's coated in silver, and then the silver is polished to a mirror-like finish, and then it's made photosensitive by exposure to certain chemicals. Then that photosensitive plate is placed into a wooden box with an attached lens and a lens cover. And that's the first primitive cameras were just wooden boxes with a hole that had a lens attached to it. And uh then once the lens cap was removed and the image was light was hitting the plate for a certain amount of time prescribed by the formula used to create the photosensitive plate, then they would cover the plate, remove it from the box, and then the still invisible image would have to be developed or made visible by exposure to heated mercury vapors, which actually cause a lot of mercury poisoning in early daguerreists. And then that image has to be fixed or the photosensitivity has to be stopped so that it doesn't continue simply to darken as light hits that plate. And it's done by washing in a solution of sodium thiosulfate. And then because daguerreotypes are so sensitive, like if you were to touch a daguerreotype, you would lift crystals off, you would deform the image, you would leave fingerprints behind, and the silver itself is interactive with sulfur in the atmosphere, you have to then seal daguerreotype under glass, uh, both for protection from being touched and from the corrosion that comes from being exposed to the atmosphere. Now, uh a very interesting uh fact of Daguerreotypes is that almost all daguerre types are backwards. So you see this image, this daguerreotype of Louis Daguerre himself taken around the year 1844, which is quite fascinating on its own. And if we were watching this photograph be taken, we would have seen him sitting like this if we were standing behind the camera. Almost all daguerreotypes are reversed images, mirror images of their subject. Now, the second thing that's fascinating about daguerreotypes is that what you see in the daguerreotype depends on the angle of which the light hits the plate and then hits your eye. So, Scott, I'm gonna play this video. And they didn't, I don't think they showed this at the conference, but this to me is so fascinating. The locket and camera here in this video are stationary. But when I hit play, all they're going to do is move the light source around the locket, and you'll see almost nothing at first, and then the actual image here.

Scott Brandley 22:09

So cool.

Curtis Weber 22:11

And in a second, you'll even see a third state, which is right about here, which is where you see the negative or the inverse of the image. It's just an amazing, amazing piece of technology. I tell people, you know, we we take photography for granted because we do, because we we now don't even have to buy film anymore. We just pull this device out of our pockets and point and take pictures constantly of the most inane things. But imagine living in a day when there's no such thing as photography, and then the next day it's announced. And oh my gosh, you know, coming to a city in a studio near you. Right. We can have your picture taken. Now,

Who is Dan Larson?

Curtis Weber 22:50

uh, this particular daguerreotype is owned uh by Dan Larson, or was, I should say, was owned by Dan Larson. It's since been uh donated to the Church History Department in Salt Lake City. But this is a photograph of Dan and my friend Andrew Eh and myself examining the locket uh back in 2022. And who is Dan Larson and why would Dan Larson have this purported picture of Joseph Smith? Well, Dan received the locket from his mother, Lois Smith Larson, before she died. She dies in November of 1992. And she calls Dan to the house and gives him a box full of uh Smith family keepsakes, including some pocket watches that belong to Dan's grandfather, Lois's father, and Lois' grandfather, Dan's great-grandfather. And Dan didn't think much of it. He tried to open this little, what he thought was another pocket watch in the collection release mechanism was bent or stuck it so it wouldn't open. He didn't think anything of it. He just put it back in the box with all the other artifacts and stored them away and didn't touch them again for 27 or 28 more years. In when the pandemic hit and we were all stuck in our homes, he and his wife got to talking about, you know, estate planning and stuff. And remember those things your mom gave you? And oh yeah, we should pull those out and look at them again. And Dan still couldn't get this little locket opened, and so he got a little knife that he uses as a letter opener and just popped it open and found out it wasn't a watch at all. Now, Dan's grandfather, Lois's father, is Frederick Madison Smith, who is the son of Joseph Smith III, who is the son of Joseph and Emma. So Dan Larson is a great-great-grandson of the prophet and Emma through the first and second presidents of the reorganized church. So this is the prominent male line of the Joseph and Emma Smith family. That was an intriguing little detail in my research when I first began. I I started my research and didn't even know that fact right away because to me everything uh depends on the forensics. Like you can make a claim, but if if forensically we can show that it doesn't match or doesn't at least correspond in some strong way, then the odds of it being a photograph of Joseph uh seem quite small. And speaking of small, the locket, as you know, is very small. Uh that's my left hand. It's only about an inch and a half in diameter, which is not very large at all. My best calculation from the top of the hair in the in the daguerreotype to the bottom of the chin is just under 0.6 inches tall. It is a very, very tiny little picture. But because daguerreotypes have very high resolution, we can actually get very fine photographs with a lot of detail of the face. And as far as I'm aware, these are some of the highest resolution. I think there's one other that I've seen now that the team that we went to that conference to see their research, they've taken some nice high-resolution images as well. But this is the flattest and uh sharpest picture I have of the daguerreotype image itself. And I didn't start my research using this, I just used the image that they had made publicly available on the press release and the news articles online that I discovered the day it was announced. But because I knew that daguerreotypes were almost always backwards, the very first thing I did was take an image of the locket and flip it. And then I found one of my photographs of uh the pedestal mask of Joseph Smith and just did a very simple uh vertical spacing test because most purported pictures fail just to even match the vertical spacing of facial features. Again, hence the claim that the mask is distorted, but as we both know, it's it's not distorted. So that's a great first check, kind of a sniff test. And it passed this test just fine, which doesn't mean anything. I mean, when I saw this, I said, okay, well, that that matches very closely, very precisely. I didn't have to fudge or fidget with this at all. I didn't have to look for different rotations of the mask and stuff. Um, and I thought, well, the way I'm going to disprove this, and I really did think I would disprove this in under 30 minutes, is I'm simply going to trace some of the contours of the face in the photograph that would be present in the death mask, and then simply put a copy of those contours over the mask. And when I saw this image and zoomed in, I said, well, uh, those are really good matches at the Ourus and the width of the mouth and the shape of the lips. And I was really stunned by the nasal labial folds. Joseph has a very asymmetrical face, and even the asymmetries of his nose. He has a nose that's slanted slightly to his left, and then the it's a little more bulbous, giving a slightly hooked back to his right uh appearance. And I was looking at that and saying, Oh, I see very close similarities between the shapes of the nose, and even evidence of hair coming up to what appeared to be the natural part in the death mask over the right temple, um, the right side of the forehead, and then sloping down, slanting, and then turning, I mean a little glob of hair there in the death mask, and then turning and going vertical, almost perfectly vertical at the left side of the forehead where there is no evidence of hair. And I thought, wow, that's that's really incredible. Now, the eyes, however, uh had both some similarities and some differences. And I looked at that and I thought, well, I'm not I'm not really an expert on eyes. Um, so I don't know what to say about this, but I very quickly realized that that this was the closest match to the death mask I had ever seen. And I could not disprove it at all, and that in fact it deserved uh additional uh attention and research to try to see what's the chance that this really could be a photograph of the prophet Joseph Smith.

Comparing the painting, death masks, and daguerreotypes

Curtis Weber 28:35

Now, in the article that was written and and uh released the same day it was announced to the world, uh two researchers, Ron Roamig and Lachlan Mackay, uh laid forth the evidence that they had discovered that led them to believe it's a picture of Joseph. Loughlin Mackay is a nephew of Dan Larson, and he's uh actually an apostle in Community of Christ Church currently. So Lachlan is a great-great-great-grandson of Joseph and Emma through his mother, uh, who is Dan Larson's sister. And in their announcement article, they only showed two images of the death mask, these two images here on the left and right side of the screen. And so I was a little confused because they only showed the death mask compared to the unreversed image, but I already knew from my initial work that if you left the daguerreotype unreversed, it didn't correspond to the death mask very closely. In fact, it contradicts the death mask. And these are just two of the most obvious ones. The hair doesn't match at all, and the nose is curving in the wrong direction. Right. Um these are not identical angles of the face, by the way, of the mask, I should say. These are these are uh at different rotations. But I also knew that uh, you know, I had to examine this in further detail, just as they did. Uh, instead of using the death mask extensively, they used this famous painting of Joseph Smith and compared it to the unreversed, again, the unreversed daguerreotype image, which I knew contradicted the asymmetries of Joseph's face. And so that I was a little confused by that at first, but they noted six correspondences in their article between the unreversed daguerreotype image and this most famous painting of Joseph Smith. And I found that very curious for a number of reasons. I had studied this painting very carefully in 2008 and 2009, and we've known the ownership history of this painting from Emma Smith's day all the way to when it was sold as part of the purchase of the Kirtland Temple and other Nauvoo properties and Smith family artifacts. Um we've known this history, it's pretty well documented, but we've never known for certain who painted this portrait or when it was painted. Uh it was once attributed to William Major, who shows up in Nauvoo after Joseph is killed. And then others had said prior to 1972 that it didn't seem to match Major's style and his skill level, it seemed to be on his skill level. And so since about 2007, uh, and based on unpublished research that I have not been able to get access to, it's been claimed that this is most likely, or is by some people say this is the David Rogers portrait that was painted in the fall of 1842 by an artist named David Rogers from New York City. Now, knowing this, there's another thing that's important to know about this painting, and it's that it does not match the vertical spacing of uh facial features as found in Joseph Smith's Death Mask or Sutcliffe Maudsley's art. So if you scale the eye and mouth to be the same, the chin aligns perfectly fine, but the nose is not anywhere close. And another way of seeing that is to trace the boundaries, outer boundaries of the flush around the nostrils and the lower edge of the nose and the mouth, and putting the death mask at best fit to the position of the nose in the painting, and you can see simply that the distance between the nose and the mouth is simply too small, significantly too small. And again, it's not that the mouth is too high, it's actually that the nose is too low in the painting, it's too tall. And when you slide it down to match the height of the mouth, another thing you see how off the nose is there, first of all. But the lip shape is not correct. The width of the mouth is not the same. And as I was looking at it, I thought, why is it so different? What would it take to get those to match? So I just shrunk the death mask 1% at a time until I arrived at what appeared to be a very close match to the both the width and the shape of the lower lip in the death mask. And that's by shrinking the width and only the width of the mask by 18%. So I've long known that this painting doesn't represent the correct anatomical structure of Joseph Smith's face on multiple fronts. And these are just two details among many that it doesn't match. And as a side note, uh, these purported photos of Joseph have the exact same facial proportions as the painting. And that means that these are also not actual photographs of the prophet Joseph Smith. They're either derived directly or indirectly from this painting, uh, which has the again the nose that's too tall, the mouth that's too narrow, and other things like the eyes are too far apart and too large for a human face. And there's some other details, but I won't go into now.

Scott Brandley 33:20

Yeah, I thought that was interesting at the conference because they talked about how these pictures were uh daguerreotype of the painting.

Curtis Weber 33:28

Yeah.

Scott Brandley 33:29

Right?

Curtis Weber 33:30

Yeah, almost even if they've been touched up, or even if someone's tried to redraw them or whatever they've done to try to create these images, they've all just assumed that this painting was accurate to Joseph's face, even though we can now show that it's not, and they have attempted to depict the prophet. I mean, to be clear, the ones on the left and the right here, these purported photographs, we know that Joseph III, when he received these paintings from his mom shortly before her death, he also received permission to have the painting of his father and the painting of his mother, Emma, photographically reproduced and then sold. And he advertises them as photographic replicas of the painting. Like he he's very clear about it that this is the painting. And how people have come to the conclusion that these are actual photographs or that a photograph came before the painting, we'll see some reasons why that might be, but it doesn't make good sense. You know, we have the death mask, we have the modsli art, we can compare all of these images to them, and we can see that these do not match the facial features. None of these are living actual faces, these are all art of some kind, right, derived from, again, directly or indirectly from the painting. Right. Now, knowing all of this, I was a little bit confused again by their heavy reliance on this painting. So I thought I'd do my own comparison by putting the unreverse daguerreotype image over the painting, uh, scaled to match the distance between the eyes approximately, and then by tracing everything now, the hair and ears and everything, including some of the clothing, and then simply taking away the daguerreotype picture. And when I saw this image, Scott, I I literally, I'm sitting in this chair right here where I was at the desk right where I was that day. I was about a week and a half or two weeks into my research, I gasped. I realized, oh my goodness, here's the contours of the painting now traced in blue, and then I'm gonna remove the painting so you can just see the blue and red contours, red being the Deberotype, and blue from uh the painting. I realized that there weren't six correspondences between the two, like the original researchers had proposed. And I'll fast forward just slightly to date, I have discovered almost 80. I think this 76 details from this painting appear in the unreversed Larson daguerreotype, the one that doesn't match the mask, right? If you leave it unreversed, it contradicts the mask. And almost all daguerreotypes are backwards, so you would expect it to be in reverse of his face in life if it really were him, and it only matched to the degree that it does uh to the death mask of Joseph Smith when it's the image of the daguerreotype is reversed. So I was blown away by this, and I I've gone now and gotten very high-resolution uh images of the painting, and then I trace a detail, a feature, uh a line, a structure, or shadows and shading in the daguerreotype, and then compare it by simply taking that painting tracing and putting it at best fit over the daguerreotype itself. Now, to be clear, the artist is playing with scale and rotation of features, but he seems to be preserving shapes and even many of the shadows and highlights in the painting directly as they appear in the unreversed daguerreotype plate. So this is the eye on the left side of the painting and the left side of the unreversed plate, including this anatomically incorrect inner corner of the eye, which appears to be based on a blurry, shadowy detail in the Daguerotype. Uh, when I traced the flesh, the folds of the eyelids above and below the eye opening, I discovered a very high degree of correspondence with those two lines. But the brow line didn't seem to match at all. And as I was looking at this, I thought, wait a second, could it be that line right there? And I thought, what do I have to do with the daguerreotype to see if that's the same line? And it turns out if you rotate it 10 degrees and scale it 10% larger, it matches like that. And I thought, okay, so I've never checked the eyebrow in the painting against the daguerreotype because they did not seem to be similar at all. And that's just a slightly deceptive truth. I think you can see here that almost the entire shape of the eyebrow seems to correspond very precisely to the shadows and shapes of the eyebrows and shadows of the side of the nose, all except this portion here, which appears uh that the artist may have thought was too bushy and he he gave it a trim in the painting. The opposite eye in the painting has a correctly drawn and rather large inner corner, that's your uh your medial canthus of the eye, and it also has a slightly sagging upper-outer uh eyelid, but that's exactly what you see in the daguerreotype, a rather large medial canthus in what appears to be a slightly sagging upper-outer eyelid. And when I trust trace the flesh around uh the eye, the eyelid folds and the brow, most of it or much of it appears to be uh based on the daguerreotype, although this portion of the inner upper eyelid fold and the lower outer boundary of the eyebrow seems to be fiction. It's not in the daguerreotype. But when I deleted those and was looking at this image, it said, oh, it looks like he just disconnected this contour and made two separate lines out of it to add some symmetry between the left and right sides in the painting. Uh this side of the face is in is in more shadow than the other side of the face, so some of the details are hard to see. And so I thought, oh, well, I've never compared the whole eyebrow before. Maybe I should do that. And when I compared the whole eyebrow, it appears that much of it is based on the Larson Deguerotype, including this little dip in the upper outer contour of this eyebrow. Now, uh, Scott, this is the only depiction of Joseph Smith in existence. This painting and a late 1890s uh copy of this painting, that in existence that shows this globellar fold or frown line between the eyes. It's a little hard to see in this picture. It's clearly there. Uh here I've increased the contrast so you can see that shadow, how it's been painted. And uh I wonder where this artist got the idea that Joseph Smith has a frown line on one side of his globella, that's this the flesh between the eyes. And it seems quite clear that he's simply copying, again, both the shape and position of that fold, that shadow caused by that fold of skin from the locket. I used to think the noses didn't match very well until I actually traced the shape of the nose in the painting, and I saw the shape of the flesh or the alias, the flesh around the nostrils, and I thought that was a pretty spot on or pretty good interpretation, especially again of that. The right side of the daguerreotype plate is in more shadow, so it's hard to see. But clearly the nostrils are not the right size. But as I was looking at this, I thought they look okay, maybe they're the same shape though, they have the same asymmetries. What would it take to see if that really is the same shape? And it turns out if you reduce the daguerreotype in scale by 18% and rotate it five degrees, that's how the nostrils line up. And I was like, yeah, I was stunned by that. I was like, that's a really strange detail because the the nose looks kind of awkward in the painting, uh, but at least he seems to be preserving the shapes, the relative shapes of the nostrils in the painting. Now, the same thing is true of the mouth. That the mouth in the painting, again, we knew was too narrow. It's much narrower than the mouth in the daguerreotype. But again, curiously, if you shrink the width of the daguerreotype 18%, look at the match of especially the asymmetries of that upper lip. Right. And I I was stunned to see these correspondences again. These are some of the things I don't know how many I've shown you here, maybe 20 out of the 80. Here's a couple more. The shape of the nasal labial fold on the left side and that shadowing at the side of the face seems to be directly copied from the Larson Digotype, as do the nasal labial fold and the shadows at the other side of the face. Well, what I saw immediately was the correspondence in the hair. This bun of hair on the left side of the painting that's that's tight against the head and high above the ear, showing more of that ear, and then it's on the other side of the face, it's further out from the face, this larger swoop of the hair, and then it's lower over the ear, covering more of that ear and making more of that ear uh hard to see or impossible to see through the hair.

Scott Brandley 41:52

One of the things they talked about at that conference was the reason that they have that kind of poofy hair on the bottom is they wore hats.

Curtis Weber 41:59

Yeah. I never like Yeah. They were they were a society that wore hats like all the time. They wore them when riding, they wore them, you know, on formal occasions, they wore top hats on formal occasions, and they when they're out working in the fields, they're wearing hats to shield the face from the sun. So yeah, they're wearing hats a lot. And it turns out that even though the hair, the painting is much taller here, the daguerreotype at best overall fit to the face, so you can see it's significantly taller. When I simply decided to test the shape by sliding the daguerreotype up and slightly to the right, I went, Oh, it looks like the artist is still basing the shape of the hair in many respects directly on the hair and the Larson daguerreotype, just in two different positions.

Scott Brandley 42:40

Right.

Curtis Weber 42:41

And I was just, every time I found a new little detail, I was just stunned, right? This one's done me. See that highlight of hair, that small patch on the left side of the screen, then there's a dark patch of hair, then there's this larger patch of highlighted hair in the painting. Well, that hair, that highlights in the hair in the painting appears to come directly off of the highlights in the daguerreotype. Again, the unreversed daguerre type. So without going into all the other little details, I saw this, Scott, and I said, oh my goodness, it looks like I immediately knew it looks like this painting was created using the unreversed Larson daguerreotype. And that immediately told me that the man in the daguerreotype is most likely Joseph, a very high degree chance that it's Joseph's. Not proof, but it's certainly evidence that indicates that that's a high likelihood. And then, of course, I already show that the daguerreotype is backwards from the death mask if it is him. And so it indicates that the painting, in fact, is probably backwards. And then that what flows from that is well, if this was painted live when he's sitting in front of an artist in 1842, why would it be backwards? And the answer is, well, it probably wasn't that painting because you wouldn't paint someone backwards if they're sitting right in front of you, unless there's some kind of weird request. I want you to only look at me in a mirror. You can't look at me directly, or hey, can you flip my face backwards? So I can see myself as I see myself in a mirror. I mean, I can't rule that out, right? But this indicates that it was probably created after Joseph's death. Now, what's fascinating is after I discovered all this evidence, I just began examining the painting more carefully and comparing it to the death mass more closely. And I've discovered 10 lines of evidence that indicate either that the painting is in fact backwards and or was created after Joseph's death. And I'm just going to go over uh two or three of them here with you real fast. So

Getting into more detail

Curtis Weber 44:30

the clearest indication that the painting is backward is simply by comparing it very carefully to the death mask. Here are the contours of the nasal labial folds and the ailey or flush around the nostrils and the nostrils themselves in the painting. And you can compare that at best fit to the width of the nose in the daguerre type. And you can see we can match the shape of the of Joseph's uh left ala very well, but the right ala shape doesn't match. And in fact, in the death mask, Joseph's right ala is lower than the left. He's got an asymmetry in his nose that's not present, uh, or at least not present in this direction uh in the painting. And then the nasolabial folds in the mask are roughly there, uh, which is not matching anywhere close to the painting. But if you take the painting and simply flip it in software horizontally and trace those exact same shapes but in reverse, well, now we're matching everywhere, and with precision, including the lower right ala and the shape of the flesh of the nostril or of the aila, the a each aila around each nostril, and of course the nasal labial folds. There's other little details like curvature of eyelids, upper eyelids, and the shape of Joseph's cupid's bow. The asymmetries in his lips in the painting are 100% backwards, as is the overall facial asymmetry. Joseph has a much smaller left side of his face than his right side. But uh, I'll move on from that and go to uh the question of hair color. So a daguerreotype is not like modern black and white photography. It's not just an old-time black and white photograph, right? Daguerreotypes capture ultraviolet uh uh wavelengths of light, and they therefore certain colors are distorted in a daguerreotype. Specifically, the ones that are very important for this are reds, oranges, yellows, and greens. They all go almost black, very dark gray in a daguerreotype. While other colors, such as blues and violets, right, it's purples down there, they're almost invisible. They come out as lighter grays uh in a daguerreotype. And it doesn't even matter if you use a lighter hue, like look at this light yellow glass uh plate over this photograph of an eye. When you take a daguerreotype of it, it still comes out very, very dark. Whereas the dark blue glass at the bottom middle on the left comes out much more transparent than any other color on the screen you see. The artist who paints this painting doesn't paint the hair color of Joseph Smith. These are locks of his hair cut from his head about six or seven months after he was killed during one of the first secret exhumation and reinterment of their bodies under Emma's supervision. These locks were cut by William Huntington and put into the martyrdom cane of his brother Dimmick. So this is the head of the cane that we're looking at here in the middle. And those are actual locks of his hair. Now, I actually have three different photographs of those same exact locks. Two of the bottom two I took, and the top one was supplied to me by a good friend Seth Soha. And you can see the different colors that there are achieved by different lighting conditions of the hair. So Joseph's hair isn't a very dark brown. Uh, it appears to be uh a more flaxen or light brown or even a golden brown. One source describes his hair as golden brown, and you can see that under certain lighting conditions, it looks very golden blonde even. So the artist doesn't know this, and he's looking at this, I think, this very dark hair in this daguerreotype, and he doesn't know that daguerreotypes are distorting the hair color, so he decides to paint really dark brown hair. Another indication that he had never seen Joseph Smith in life. And then the last one I'll just mention is there's a companion portrait, this one of Emma, the similar background and pose. Their bodies are turned towards each other. Interestingly, Emma's face is turned in a three-quarter pose, but Joseph's is not. His face is looking almost directly straight at you. Um turns out this very first known daguerreotype, which was taken uh in the fall of 1845, that's David Hiram Smith sleeping in her lap in this photograph. It's a very famous photo. Uh, this is a carte de visite copy of a daguerreotype. The daguerreotype is actually turning black, it's been exposed to too much air, and it's beginning to be hard to see the image these days. Um, but if you look at her CDV, which is the way the daguerreotype is, and you assume that daguerreotypes are backwards, if you flip Emma, and we do know that it was her right eyelid that was drooping, we have other later photographs and her drooping right eyes and all those, and they had corrected the reversing problem in photographic equipment in the process by the later years of her life, uh, this is how you would see Emma. And it turns out that if you trace the contours of Emma's uh face as captured in that carte de visite copy of her daguerreotype and the painting, there are 27 correspondences between them, including very precise correspondences at the chin and her left cheek. But what's really fascinating is that the artist cheated here when trying to make her look younger, instead of shaving off that jowl of her left cheek, he actually just connected it to her chin with a continuous curve, giving the impression of this nice smooth, young-looking face. But that gray area in the painting is pure fiction. She never had bone structure or flesh to create that shape of face. A lot of artists I've talked to immediately recognize that this is just a cheap little technique to skip having to reshape the entire left cheek and try to come up with in your own mind what you think her cheek would have looked like without that jowl. So it looks like these two portraits were actually created by an artist using these two daguerreotypes of Joseph and and this person on the right, assuming it's uh Joseph in this case. And I I was just stunned to find that this

Reviews of Curtis’ work

Curtis Weber 50:15

was the case. So at this point in my research, everything that you've seen and a whole lot more, I wrote up in an article that was submitted for possible publication, and it was sent off to be reviewed by uh two different uh sets of experts, or two four different anthrop forensic anthropologists actually actually reviewed my work. Um one of them was very negative. There's three written reviews, I should say. One review was written by two experts. Um the first review I received uh as as part of this possible publication process was very negative. In fact, I I so negative I just was sick to my stomach, thought how could I be so wrong? And then I went back and started reading this person's uh claims about my work, and the more I read, the more that feeling went away. Almost every claim, every major claim, anyway, of that negative review is demonstrably false. It's it's ridiculous how badly and poorly written and thought through kind of poor evidence this expert was able to produce in order to attempt to contradict my work. But the other three experts are positive, and the they gave me permission to share their reviews with the public. The expert who wrote the negative review, you would think I would want to hide it or not tell people about it, but I actually wish I could share everything about it because it's so bad that I was working on it one day, and my son, who was 15 at the time, walked in the door with a good friend from uh school who's the same age, and this kid who has no training, no experience, no introduction to the topic, I said, Tell me what's wrong with this image. You're trying to compare a death mask to a face. And he looked at this other expert's work, and with five seconds pause, he said, he doesn't have the mask at the same angle as the face in the picture. I said, That's exactly right, right? You you have to try to match angles and rotation in order to compare apples to apples as closely as possible in this type of work. The first person I ever talked to is a man named Mark Dobbs, who spent 18 years working in forensic anthropology with law enforcement agencies in the San Francisco area, and he also taught at the collegiate level for a combined 19 years. And he said, based on my education, training, and experience, I find Weber's work to be highly rigorous and entirely consistent with forensic level best practices. Weber's work, in my estimation, is quite thorough and adheres to sound anthropological principles and forensic standards. I have seen many cases where much less work went into resolving identity in modern forensic matters, to be honest. I see no defect in methodology or mission of critical detail that would lead me to discount his conclusion. I was thrilled for the very first time in my life to talk to someone who had been trained in this field of forensic anthropology and to hear that type of uh praise coming from him and to have him be willing to put that in writing. That was wonderful. Now, the other written review I received as part of the peer review process for that submitted article, it was co-authored by Caroline Wilkinson, director of FaceLab in Liverpool John Moore's University. She is a world-renowned forensic anthropologist. In fact, Scott, I used her 2008 book, Forensic Facial Reconstruction, as part of my deep dive into anatomy when I was trying to figure out how I could match the death mask to skull photographs, skull and mask research. And her co-author in this review of my work is Sarah Shrimpton, whose name she was not known to me prior to receiving this, but she has a PhD in face recognition and works as a postdoctoral assistant at John Moore's University at FaceLab. And here's uh just some two excerpts from what they said in their four or five or six-page uh review. Uh Curtis Weber carries out a morphological comparison between the Larson daguerreotype and the death mask. That just means a shape comparison, essentially. This morphological uh comparison appears rigorous, and we would agree with the majority of this assessment. We agree that there are multiple correspondences between the daguerreotype and the death masks and Mosley drawings. Therefore, we agree that the daguerreotype is likely an authentic image of Joseph Smith in life. And Scott, can you imagine? I mean, yeah, it just seems amazing, right?

Scott Brandley 54:11

Yeah.

Curtis Weber 54:12

I was up here hooting and hollering as I read this. I uh I opened it nervous because of that first review was so negative, I thought, oh, and I jumped right to their concluding paragraph and read their conclusion. I started screaming. My family thought, what's going on with that upstairs? I just couldn't believe how thrilled I was. I've known Caroline Wilkinson's name and her reputation since 2008. I had always wanted my work to be reviewed by someone with that level of skill and credential. And the fact that that Dr. Shrimpton and Professor Wilkinson both reviewed it and came to this conclusion together, I was just thrilled, you know.

Scott Brandley 54:44

That's

Studying 3D models of the Dibble masks + addressing the claims and counterclaims of the daguerreotype

Scott Brandley 54:45

awesome, man.

Curtis Weber 54:46

Yeah. Now, the next thing I'm going to show you though is what I've discovered after I received all these reviews. Because I got these in the summer of 2023, I think is correct. And I knew there were still questions I couldn't answer. There's still criticisms and objections to the Daguerotype. I knew that it still needed further research. So that summer I actually began using the 3D model of the oldest known death mask, the Dibble mask, the ones that have that kind of brown and tan varnish over the mask, um, more extensively in my research. And what I discovered very quickly is that the oldest known death mask actually fits the Daguerotype better than the uh second oldest mask. And what I had not known, and that I was confused by this, the nose in the pedestal mask, the image on the left, is about 3% smaller than the width of the nose in the dibble mask. And so since I was using the width of the nose as a guide, as trying to match that width in my comparisons as an initial starting point, in order to fit the dibble mask to the face, you have to scale down the mask about 3%. And when you do that, look at the correspondence of the hairline and at the chin. It's it's even tighter than the pedestal mask, rather. Now, I started using the 3D mask to try to address, like I said, all the different things I couldn't say with any degree of rigor or certainty about the face in the Daguerotype. I still couldn't prove that it was Joseph, but I knew the evidence was quite strong that it was him. But I wanted to be able to address all the various claims and counterclaims about this image. Specifically, there's a claim that the nose is too small. And I had already been able to show that the height of the nose is correct and the asymmetries and the curvature of the nose appear to be correct, as do the shapes of the nostrils and the flesh around the nostrils. But what about the three-dimensional volume of the nose, what you would see in profile, right? If you only have one photograph taken of you at one angle, what would you be able to tell about the three-dimensional shape of any given feature? Well, I realized that we have the three-dimensional shape of Joseph's nose in the death mask. And there is a branch of science called psiography or skiography, you can pronounce it either way, which deals with how light and shadow falls upon a three-dimensional form. Now, what's fascinating is that psyography is an exact science, Scott, meaning uh artists can go through courses to train themselves how to correctly draw shadows on three-dimensional objects so that their artwork is actually accurate to what our eyes would see if we were to see those objects in the real world.

Scott Brandley 57:16

Basically using like math?

Curtis Weber 57:18

Yes. You can see all these angles and calculations and everything can be mathematically traced to the science of psyography. It's an exact science. In fact, psyography is used by three-dimensional software, 3D software. When you put lighting into a scenario, that lighting has to interact in a believable way with the three-dimensional objects given the properties of the objects you've given them in your 3D software. And so, for instance, here's an angle of the death mask. I didn't document the angle at which I placed the mask relative to the camera. I didn't document how far away the camera is, and the camera distance will affect the perspective distortion or the shape distortions that happen in any photographic image. But even without knowing the rotation of the mask and the position of the camera, anyone in the world could download the Church History Department's 3D model, go into a photo editing software, and attempt to replicate this image by lighting the mask, taking an image of it, and comparing it in Photoshop or some other image software to what I've shown here. That's because every three-dimensional object will cast the exact same shadows when lit the exact same way, or similar shadows when lit in a similar way, right? And what I realized again is that since we have the shape of the nose, I could simply attempt to light the mask in such a way to see if I could replicate this shadow on the right cheek. It's as a shadow of the nose. And this would tell me something about the size and shape of the nose casting that shadow. And so in order to do that, you have to analyze the daguerreotype just a little bit to recognize that there are some bright lights, that the strongest light, what's called the key light, appears to be coming. Maybe there's even two key lights. It's hard to say based off that highlights and the forehead, but in the nose and the lips and the chin, you can see the highlights that are on the face. And then the darker shadows on the right side of the face indicate that the next brightest light is coming from uh his left. But there are also shadows on the right side of the face that are hard for our modern photography to get, but daguerotypes are very unique on the photography. Uh, they're going to be able to capture shadows differently and even in more detail in some senses, in some lighting scenarios, than our modern photography. He's lit from his right side of the face as well. And there's there's other light sources. Undoubtedly, I I can't, I'm not attempting to replicate the bouncing of light off of objects, you know, refracting light in the room where they're having the stagerotype made. But what I did do was simply attempt first uh to light the mask from the left side and from above left to see if I could produce a shadow on the right cheek that was similar in shape and size to the shadow in the Larson daggerotype. And here is a tracing of the boundary between the deepest shadows on this image of the mask when it's lit from two angles and the lighter uh portions of the mask. And just to be clear, this isn't a hand tracing. I didn't determine there's there's no human agency in this. This is an algorithm telling me where the boundary lines are between light and dark, which is why it's such an irregular, unusual shape. And then I all I had to do, Scott, was simply remove the mask. And when I when I did that, I went, oh, yeah. What it matches the shadow just very nicely at the right cheek, but it's also a very decent match at the crown of the nose, uh-huh, eyebrow ridge at the deepest part of the eye socket, and then how the shadow dips under the tip of his nose and then steps down over his upper right lip, and even where the shadow falls on his right lower lip and his right eyelid and eyeball, which you can see even better under different filters where you increase the contrast. And I said, Oh my goodness, three-dimensional correspondences to the death.

Scott Brandley 1:00:56

Yeah, that's crazy.

Curtis Weber 1:00:58

I already believed it was Joseph, and so I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was almost as stunned as when I saw how similar the gyrotype, the unreversed daguerreotype, and the famous painting of the prophet are. And I was like, wow, you know. And this is fascinating. You can use the same process and you can test claims that it's Hiram, because a lot of people keep saying, this is a picture of Hiram. It doesn't look anything like Joseph. I don't know how they would be able to say that, but they say it doesn't look like the death mask at all to me. So I say, well, let's take Hiram's mask and let's light it from the left, trying to get as many matches. And I could show you hundreds of images of Hiram's mask lit from differing angles to try to replicate shadows on the faces seeing the Garotype. Here I can show you uh a very decent at the eye position, the eyelid, and at the depth of the eye socket, and even the curvature of the cupid's bow and then that side of the filtrum of the lip, but nothing else matches. And that's because they don't have the same three-dimensional shape, which again you can reveal by simply increasing the contrast and applying some filters to see where the light and shadows in the goat. Um so it's definitely not a picture of Hiram. It doesn't match Hiram in my two-dimensional comparisons, and so you wouldn't expect it to match in 3D, but I can actually show hundreds of examples of how it doesn't match. They just have slightly different shape faces in three dimensions. Um, here's Joseph's mask again, but now instead of lighting from the left side of the face, I've I thought, well, if it is Joseph, it'd have to be the same on both sides of the face. It would have to match. So can I light it from the right side of the face and see the shadows on the left side of the mask? And the answer is, oh yeah, with some amazing precision. Uh again, the bottom two are a little harder to see, but let me go to this filter. You can see these boundaries of light and shadow on the upper lip and even where the lower lip starts to fall in the shadow. Very, very similar lighting. Let me zoom in on the nose just to show you how precise the shadowing on the nose is. Look at that from the tip running up about 70-75% of the way up. Yeah. Very specific asymmetrical line that corresponds beautifully to the death mask. It's just amazing. And even this upper portion, it's a little harder to see, but in the daguerrepe, there is subtle shading that is at the angle of curvature of the bone structure as revealed by the death mask. So it looks like Joseph had some extra loose flesh at the side of the top of his nose, right between the eyes, just below the glabella there. And uh, that shadow uh evidence in the daguerreotype matches the contour of bone structure in the death mask. The flesh appears to be pushed up against the bone tight, and it's actually, I won't show the slides, but it's actually displaced the eyelids in the death mask outward, giving this kind of bunched up, saggy, baggy appearance of the eyelids, which is not anatomically correct at all. But it's amazing that the daguerreotype would have explanatory power for explaining uh uh anatomical anomalies in the death mask. Here's a really fun one, Scott. He's not lit this way in the daguerreotype, but I was moving the light in 3D software because by moving the light around different positions, you can see different things about the three-dimensional shape of the face. And in this one, positioned light perfectly centered down the middle of the mask, just a little bit forward of the mask. I was trying to learn about his brow structure, because if the orbital bones above the eyes are not the same, then no matter how many other matches you have, those bones are not broken in the 1928 skull photograph, so they won't be broken or damaged in the death mask, and they certainly won't be broken or damaged in a living photograph. So I actually did learn something about the brows, but I actually accidentally learned something about his eyeballs and his eyelids. So if you trace the boundary between the deepest shadows and the highlights on the mask, you can see that there is this asymmetry between the inner corners of his right and left eye. Well, it turns out that asymmetry is caused by the fact that his left eyeball is placed slightly deeper in his head and slightly further away from his nasal bones, giving that three-dimensional shape that results in a different shadow pattern. It's a wider, deeper shadow. In fact, I I didn't cue up the slides to show you, but his left eye at one point is about 1.92 millimeters deeper in his head than his right eye. And that's the cause of this difference that we're seeing in the three-dimensional shape, as revealed by the shadows when it's lit this way. And the result of lighting it this way is this kind of consistent arc over the upper right eyelid, while his left eyelid has this kind of tighter curve on the inside corner, right? Yeah. That's what we're seeing here in this image. Well, when you remove the mask and compare the curvature of the closed eyelids to the curvature of the opened eyelids.

Scott Brandley 1:05:41

Yeah. Oh, that's so cool.

Curtis Weber 1:05:44

It was. I was like, oh my goodness. Asymmetrical curvature of the eyelids of the prophet Rose of Smith in his death mask and in the Gyarotype. I was stunned. I was stunned to find that. I again I did not know I would find this, it just came from plain realm. Light in 3D software to see what I would see, and I just didn't know what I would discover. And what's really amazing, Scott, the single image of the mask lit from above, if you increase the contrast in the daguerreotype, look at the structure of the orbital bones. There's no problem with the structure of the orbital bones. There are correspondences all around the brows and all around the eyes. There are correspondences at the nose and the filtrum as the shadow goes down, correspondences at the nasal labial folds, even little shadows and highlights and curvatures of the lips and indentations above the lips, and even asymmetries of his chin are revealed by this single light placed above the mask. Now, I could have rested on all those laurels and said, look, I can light the mask by three or four or five different angles and show in this single image of the mask there's 20, I think 26 correspondences. But I thought, you know, I gotta go for Brooke. What happens if I take the death mask and light it by three different angles from the above left, from the left, and from the right? And instead of tracing just one dark line between, you know, the darkest shadows and the lighter hues or lighter tones, values on the death mask, what I'll do is I'll select a pixel in the nose, the same pixel, repeatedly click it with different settings, and I'll do the darkest shadows first in one color, and then I'll do the next lightest shadows in another color, and the next lightest, and so forth, all the way until I can basically create a 3D topographical gradation mapping of the surface of Joseph's mask when the mask is lit from three angles, right? Similar to the face in the daguerreotype. Now, just to be clear, if I were to change the angles of lightings, all those lines are going to change, but again, those are not hand-traced lines. These are Photoshop's algorithms tell me where the boundaries between different gradations of light and shadow. Does that make sense?

Scott Brandley 1:07:52

And this is just the death mask topography at this point?

Curtis Weber 1:07:55

That's right. All those colored lines are straight from the death mask and nothing else. Okay. Gotcha. And so what I thought then is what I'll do is take away the mask and see how the contours of the mask compare to the shadow contours and highlight contours on the face in the daguerreotype. And when I saw this, I went, oh my goodness. And let me just increase the contrast here and posteriorize it a little bit so you can see those boundary lines between different gradations just a little bit clearer. And I always zoomed in for whatever reason on the chin first. I had never seen correspondences at the chin until I used three lights. One or two lights can't produce that shadow and highlight pattern on the deathbeds. But when you put three lights, look at that level of detail. That asymmetric oval shape at the chin. And the lips all over the place, all kinds of little details. I won't even go into all of them here, but I was stunned to see how many details I could discern in the lips. Here's a really fun one. There's this kind of deep shadow at the corner of kind of a tall, flat topped shadow. Well, look at that gold line from the death mask. I'm going to trace it in red and remove the mask lines in here with a dashed line. And this is a filtered image. Let me go to the unfiltered, except I have the black and white filter turned on. Look at where that shadow above the upper left corner of his upper lip appears. And this is not even Photoshop, this is in PowerPoint. I just increased the contrast of this image. Look where that line ends. It's like, oh my goodness, even the minutest of little shadows and details at curvatures of the lips are there. And then I'll simplify this by removing some lines. Look at the pattern at the shadow and light on the filtrum. It's just so precise all the way around the entire filtrum. And I like this one because you can really see the very specific shape of the corner of his upper left lip. I was just, again, stunned to find so many correspondences so obvious once I use this technique. This one I did not expect to find. And here I'll turn the line dash so you can see the contour correspondences a little bit better. You start here at this bulge at the top of the right eyebrow, and it starts high and then dips and then slants up at a certain angle for a certain distance and then dips down slightly and then slants up slightly and then dips a little bit further in the mask and then rises back up to this corresponding spot in the daguerreotype, dips slightly, the slight difference between life and death, and then it follows the deepest shadow as it snakes down the right side of his nose. I did not expect to find eyebrow correspondences between the daguerreotype and the death mask. I would have thought that having the plaster on the eyes, the hair and the the hair of the eyebrows in particular in this case would make it distorted, but not by too much, it appears. And then the same contour line, look at the shape on the left eyebrow. I mean, that is a very specific asymmetrical shape. It's not a hundred percent looking at the difference between life and death. Right. I was just stunned. And then if you zoom out and look at both eyes and look at some different contours, not only do you see correspondences all the way across from the right side to the left side of the face, but look at the left cheek with the highlight curvature of the bone underlying bone structure with that kind of consistent uh angle or that curve there on his left cheek, and then look at the right cheek, how the shadow starts high and then dips down and then rises. So even asymmetries in either the flesh and the underlying bone structure of his face are preserved both in the death mask and in the lightero type. Uh Scott, I was just stunned. Stunned. Nothing incredible. Yeah. This single image of the death mask, and I have not sought to change the lighting. Like maybe I have the camera at a slightly different distance, so it's giving a slightly different perspective distortion. Maybe I have the I almost certainly I do, right? Almost certainly I have the lights in slightly different positions relative to the death mask than the lights on the face. But this single image of the mask alone produces 64 three-dimensional contour correspondences to the death mask. Not points of correspondence, but lines. And a line is technically an infinite series of points in three-dimensional space. That means I could take every one of those lines, and if I I put a point in three-dimensional space on the death mask at the beginning point of the correspondence, at the middle point, and at the end point, I would have what is that, 192 three-dimensional points of correspondence as opposed to 64 lines or contours of correspondence.

Scott Brandley 1:12:35

Those points are points in space, in 3D space that match.

Curtis Weber 1:12:39

Exactly. Yeah. So what we're showing here is that the facial structure of the man in this photograph is nearly identical to the face in the Larson Daguerreotype. And the only differences that exist between them are all explainable as differences between a living face and a dead face. There's not a single difference between the face in the Daguerotype and the death mask that can't reasonably and even accurately be measured and shown now that we have these two sources to compare against each other. It's stunning.

Custis’ verdict

Curtis Weber 1:13:10

Yeah, it's amazing. This is why I say now it's thrilling for me able to say this. This absolutely is a photograph of the prophet Joseph Smith. Yeah. I mean, it is stunning to me that I can say that. I I tell my kids, I can't believe you're going to grow up knowing what Joseph Smith looked like. And I have no qualms whatsoever. There's not a single claim or counterclaim about this image that I can't test. Uh well, of the things that I can test, right? The death mask doesn't show the shape of his ears, for instance. And then I go so far back on the jawline. I can't prove that uh those are correct based off the death mask because they don't exist in the death mask. But given all the evidence that I've discovered, this absolutely is a picture of Joseph Smith. And I don't have any problem saying that to anybody, even to people who insist it's not. It's like, well, you're welcome to your opinion, but I know a guy who's looked into it pretty heavily. This is the face of the prophet Joseph Smith. Now, it is a daguerreotype, and it has lots of scratches and you know other flaws and corrosion marks, like all those black flecks around the face and the mouth. Those are corrosion marks on the plate itself. Those aren't you know uh moles or pimples or things on his face, I don't believe. Um, but you can take the daguerreotype, and this isn't the most realistic one I've ever seen, but it's the one I have uh worked on with a friend of mine uh to imagine what it'd be like to see Joseph a little bit if we were there in person. You know, maybe the hair goes a little bit darker than this, maybe it's really hard to tell from the information we have. But now I'm guessing it's skin tone and eye color a little bit. We do know he had blue eyes, and some people said light blue, some people even said light gray. So I've chosen here to go with a lighter shade of blue. But this is this is my closest current approximation to what I think the prophet looked like using all the information we have about his appearance. I still like to see it, the original image better, but I've actually combined the two a little bit to try to give a little more historic sense of the photograph, not the face of the prophet cleaned up. But that's my story, Scott. That's what I've discovered over the past uh four years now of looking at this question. And I'm just stunned that we have a picture of the prophet Joseph Smith. So

Subscribe to Curtis’ email list

Curtis Weber 1:15:15

uh I'll just put one last slide up and say if anyone wants to subscribe to uh my email list, I've I think I've sent out two or three emails over the past two years since creating this list, or maybe it's only been a year and a half or so. I don't have anything to sell yet. I don't I I don't have a book, I don't have anything, uh, you know, I'm not selling the artwork or anything of the prophet, but what I have for free is knowledge and the research that I've been trying to share freely with the world. Uh, that this this even if you don't have you know a testimony or or aren't a believer in the life and mission of of Joseph Smith as a prophet of the Lord, it's a fascinating uh study in both facial identification and the history of photography. Here's a man who we didn't know was photographed for certain, and now I can tell people, yeah, he was photographed and we have the photograph. It's pretty incredible.

Final thoughts & conclusions

Curtis Weber 1:16:00

178 years after he's killed, the photograph comes out.

Scott Brandley 1:16:03

Wow. That is incredible. Especially that last picture. I mean, when you have the topographical map over top of the yeah, let me let me go back to amazing.

Curtis Weber 1:16:14

Yeah, when people say, see, it doesn't match, I'm like, what? You don't either understand what you're looking at or there's something wrong with what your how your eyes connect to your brain, because this is an amazingly stunningly precise match to the to the contours of the death mask.

Scott Brandley 1:16:29

Yeah, I don't know how you can refute that. I mean, yeah, it's gonna get any closer than that.

Curtis Weber 1:16:35

Well, again, this is not me choosing what lines to create in a certain sense, right? I'm I actually have done it if I showed you every colored line I have across the surface of the mask, it would hide the picture practically. I've done it every one to two levels of tolerance that's a setting in Photoshop. So every gradation layer of between zero and 255. So there's 256 levels of value or of grayscale that you can select through this method. And I've done every single one of them. And so I hear I've chosen to show you every 12th contour because it shows the most uh direct correspondences while showing more of the face through the contour colors. But it's just stunning to me how precise and how exact this evidence is, you know. Wow.

Scott Brandley 1:17:21

Yeah, man, that is awesome, Curtis. Just I'm so glad. I'm so glad I ran into you at that convention because it this is just incredible.

Curtis Weber 1:17:30

Well, I don't remember, I think I was on the stage talking to to a couple of people and you were standing there, and and I I I love I I do this in public places in line at Disneyland. I do this uh in elevators, you know, for 30 seconds, and I sit down with people and spend hours going over the evidence. Uh, you know, I just I'm just stunned this exists, and I'm just happy to share uh all this evidence with uh with as many people as possible. So I really appreciate your interest and your willingness and desire to have me on and to have your viewers uh get a chance to see all this evidence.

Scott Brandley 1:18:02

Yeah. There you go. So everyone that's watching right now, you're looking at a picture of Joseph Smith right there. Just pretty amazing.

Curtis Weber 1:18:10

And again, this is backwards from as you would see it in the locket. So this is how we would see him if we were looking at him. Uh or if rather, you know, obviously we're seeing all the flaws of a daguerreotype, but uh, if the daguerreotype had captured him, you know, as we would see him if we were looking at him, his hair is parted on the upper right side of his forehead. Awesome. Just incredible.

Scott Brandley 1:18:32

Yeah. Wow. Thank you for all your work, all your hard work and effort that went into the you're welcome, right?

Curtis Weber 1:18:39

I did it because I'm a little obsessed with Joseph Smith in general, and uh just thought I was gonna disprove this picture and I thought I would do it in under 30 minutes, and here we are. It's been four years now, uh coming up in about uh nine days is the fourth year anniversary of the announcement of the discovery of this locket. And I I'm like I said earlier, I'm still stunned. I don't I shouldn't be. Like I've looked at it and thought about it so much over the last four years and done so much of this work, I should just be over it by now. I think, but I'm just like, oh my gosh, sometimes just catch myself like, oh my gosh, I have a picture of Joseph Smith on my phone, you know, sitting right here. I could just look at it anytime. And yeah, it's just crazy that that exists, you know, just crazy. Right.

Scott Brandley 1:19:17

Well, yeah, I never thought I'd I would see a real picture of Joseph Smith in my lifetime.

Curtis Weber 1:19:22

I have to tell you a funny story though. Back in the day when I was doing my skulls and mask research, and I was talking to my mom at like five or six in the evening here, and it's a couple hours, it was three hours difference where they live, time. And and uh anyway, I was just talking to her and I was so excited about everything I was discovering. My mom was completely not impressed, I think, because she said, Curtis, what does it matter? And I had this, I I laughed. I said, Well, you're right. It doesn't matter where his where he's buried, it doesn't matter, you know, in the case of the photograph, what he looks like, but man, the human face is so interesting to us. We love looking at faces from birth on. Faces are important to us. And even though this is a tiny little photograph and it's grainy and it's black and white, and it's got all kinds of flaws on it, just being able to say, wow, I can look at a photographic image of the prophet Joseph Smith that we didn't even know existed, it's pretty incredible. It's pretty incredible.

Scott Brandley 1:20:10

Yeah, I agree. I think it it deepens your relationship to the visual, because we're visual beings.

Curtis Weber 1:20:19

Yeah, right.

Scott Brandley 1:20:20

I think that makes a difference. Like, for example, like the picture in the background, like the sacred grove. I've heard stories about the sacred grove. I heard about Joseph Smith going to the sacred grove my whole life, but going there and being in the grove changes you as a person, right? It just adds to the experience.

Curtis Weber 1:20:38

I mean, any photographic record, whether it's motion picture, like a moving uh video of something on film or still photography, it's a capturing a moment in time. And it's literally capturing light, which is what's fascinating about photography. It's light being preserved so you can capture a moment, whether that's a historic figure or a historic place or a historic event. It's just an amazing thing that exists that didn't exist prior to August 1839. We didn't have photography. But this technology to capture, shall we say, truth, like the truth of the light bouncing off an object or a series of objects, it's amazing. And when it's the human face, as you noted, it's fascinating that we can look at it and it makes him more real, right? Joseph Smith has always lived sort of in the space where other figures pre-photography have lived, kind of the they're in our mind, in our imagination. They exist in art, they exist in sculpture and painting, in portrayals by actors, and but they all are not the real thing. And then to see how photons of light or how waves of UV light in this case bounced off the prophet's face and were captured on this little piece of photosensitized silver. It's really kind of cool. It's exciting.

Scott Brandley 1:21:49

Yeah.

Curtis’ cameo in a documentary

Scott Brandley 1:21:50

Oh, that's awesome. Well, thanks for everything you've done to bring this to light. Are you part of this documentary that's coming out? Or because I know they brought you on stage and they like had you answer questions.

Curtis Weber 1:22:00

So I've been I was interviewed on a two or three different occasions, maybe, for the documentary. I don't know how much I'm in it. They're not using my research directly that I'm aware of, other than the things that I say about it in those interviews. Uh, I can't recall if they've uh asked to use some of my images just to show them. I don't remember. So I'm as excited as everyone else to see what's actually in the documentary. They come to the same conclusion that I do. They use different methodologies and have a different approach in many cases, and they've done some beautiful, amazing work that I don't have the skill set or time or the resources to be able to do. I'm thrilled for what they've been able to find and produce. And there's a few points of difference between our approaches and in our some of our uh conclusions. We talked a little bit about the skull identification question, and to me that's still a little bit up in the air, but I'm really hoping to see a lot more uh forensic data on their process so I can analyze it and see how accurate their work is compared to what I've done. And you know, they they've already shown behind the scenes some of the potential flaws in some of my previous work, and I can recognize those or at least the potential for those errors. So I'm open to being proven wrong about the skulls, for instance, but this photograph has enough evidence, again, like I said, just between the death mask and the daguerreotype to be able to say, Oh yeah, that's a picture of Joseph Smith. I I told people once, I don't care if this was found under a half-frozen rock in Antarctica. I would say I don't know how it got there, but I think that's a picture of the prophet Joseph Smith, just about how it manages the death mask, right? But in this case, it's Dan Larson, a great-great-grandson, and he inherits it from his mother. Here's a fascinating detail. His mother, Lois, is uh one of two daughters. Frederick Madison Smith didn't have any sons. Frederick's m wife dies when she's rather young, and I believe in a car accident, tragically. And so Lois kind of becomes the de facto first lady of the RLDS church. She would accompany her father to public functions and so forth. And even in later years, she and her husband uh went to live on Frederick's farm. And so when Frederick dies, Lois inherits the farm and everything on it. I don't think Lois knew that she had a picture of Joseph Smith in a locket tucked away in this cardboard box that she gave to Dan. She doesn't mention anything about photographs or about the prophet Joseph Smith when she hands the box to him. And so I don't think she ever got it open, or maybe even thought to try it. Who knows if she tried and it was stuck and she didn't think anything of it. But she hands it to Dan and sits in his possession untouched for 27 or 28 years until he gets

Outro

Curtis Weber 1:24:20

it open. And my goodness, it's an incredible story.

Scott Brandley 1:24:23

And now we get to witness history, so that's pretty cool. Yeah. Well, man, thanks so much, Curtis. I know it's getting late, but I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and share this with us.

Curtis Weber 1:24:33

Happy to do it.

Scott Brandley 1:24:34

If anybody wants to get a hold of you, they could they could scan that code that came up. Is there any other way for them to find you?

Curtis Weber 1:24:41

Uh they can reach out on Facebook. Yeah, they can reach out on Facebook. I'm easy to find on Facebook.

Scott Brandley 1:24:46

So okay. Awesome. Well, thanks again for coming on, and to everyone for tuning in to another episode of Latter Day Lights. Be sure to go hit that share button. Let's get Curtis's story out there. Let's share this amazing discovery with as many people as you can because this is a really cool opportunity. I'm like so excited about it, Curtis. It's just so cool.

Curtis Weber 1:25:07

I get it. I've seen people come to tears as they see the evidence. And some people, you know, mock us for believing in Joseph Smith or for revering him as we do. But it's not worship. It's not uh, you know, some people probably do, but he's a real person, a real figure from history. He has a real face, he had a real story, very complicated, difficult, and many ways amazing story. And I've seen people who love the prophet, like I said, come to tears as they realize the level of evidence that, oh my gosh, I'm looking at the face of the prophet Joseph Smith. And that's been wonderful. So hearing you react with this amazement, it's how I still feel almost every time I look at it. I just catch my breath and like, oh my gosh, that's really him. That's insane that we didn't know it existed. And I tell people, imagine if we didn't know what Abraham Lincoln looked like from a photograph. All we had was his death mask and some paintings. And then someone found a photograph 178 years later. That's like a huge historic find. Yeah, you know, and for those of us who appreciate the role in the life and history of Joseph Smith, that's the kind of level of excitement that it brings. It's like, wow, the face of the prophet Joseph Smith. That's amazing. Yeah, love it.

Scott Brandley 1:26:15

Well, thanks again. Thanks everyone for tuning in. And again, go share this. Let's get this story out there. And if you guys have a story that you'd like to share, you can go to latterdaylights.com and I'd be happy to have you on the show. So until next time, thanks again, Curtis. And thanks everyone for tuning in. And we'll see you next week with another episode of Latterday Lights. Until then, take care. Bye bye.