Joseph Smith Photo

I’d follow the man in the photo to the ends of the earth.

The soft squish in the painting I’ve always been uncomfortable with.

One has lived a life of consecration and knows sacrifice. The other has not. Nice painting, but never felt like it had the weight of Joseph behind it.

He certainly looks like he’s lived on the frontier and worked hard in the sun. Very handsome man!

I’m withholding judgement for now. Provenance sounds compelling, but no way to know if it’s Joseph at this point.

I kind of hope that the photo is Joseph. I looked at it for a long time, and I think those could be his eyes.

Plenty of counter explanations are popping up. See:
https://www.millennialstar.org/was-a-photo-of-joseph-smith-discovered/

It’s pretty obvious that the photo doesn’t match the paintings.

Whether it could match the mask, the experts will have to weigh in. But to my untrained eye, no, I don’t see a match to the mask.

One critic says that one of JS III’s fathers-in-law, Madsen, is a candidate. Madsen’s daughter was JS III’s 2nd wife; and it was their daughters (Madsen’s grand-daughters) who were photographed with the locket.

The M* thread links to a couple twitter threads with further photo comparisons.

I looked up the Debi’s Dive into History yt channel, and that has further comparisons and investigations.

Bottom line: neither a comparison to the mask, nor the provenance story provides a definitive conclusion yet.