Brother Joseph Again: The Unconfirmed Face in the Locket
A locked heirloom with a faulty latch. A face revealed by flashlight. A broken chain of custody.
The ingredients of the film Brother Joseph Again suggest a historical detective story, with a question worthy of the great Sherlock Holmes: Does this daguerreotype actually depict Joseph Smith?
What draws me in isn’t simply the fact that I might get a definitive answer to this question.
I’m personally magnetized by the tension between those clues that can be measured, counted, and weighed versus my convictions that cannot.
In recent years, this mystery begins with Dan Larson, who was Joseph Smith, Jr.’s great-great-grandson and closest living relative, who inherited family keepsakes in the 1990s.
Among them was what he thought was a pocket watch with a stubborn latch. Dropping it in a safe, he left it there for decades until 2020, when, during the pandemic, he decided to pry it open with a letter opener.
Under a pen flashlight, a face emerged.
For the documentary’s recreation, researcher and filmmaker Patrick Bishop made a replica to protect the original. Daylen Pollard, the film’s director, recorded Larson retracing the discovery in his study. Larson became emotional. So did Bishop, who says he stepped outside rather than let feeling compromise the objectivity he had tried to maintain throughout four years of research.
Here, the detective story acquires its central complication: Everyone wants to recognize the face. But, recognition is not undeniable identification. And Bishop acknowledges the absence of “an ironclad provenance.”
Other clues require reconstruction. He says his main forensic collaborator, Joseph Brickey, spent three years manually rebuilding skulls in 3D from a handful of photographs taken during Joseph and Hyrum Smith’s 1928 exhumation. Death masks, portraits, tissue depths and evidence of facial injury become pieces of the puzzle.
Even the Carthage martyrdom recreation serves the inquiry of the actual person photographed in the locket. Pollard paid an actor of comparable stature to replay the scene. Accounts of injuries after Smith’s fall inform the researchers’ interpretation of the skulls and masks.
The filmmakers arrive at a very well thought out conclusion. That conclusion, however, does not erase the tension between their interpretation and what each clue can indisputably establish.
And, I keep asking myself, why should an authentic image of Joseph Smith even matter? For those aware of the Heartland model of the Book of Mormon, I wonder why people care WHERE it takes place as much as it DID take place and HOW the principles it espouses can influence our lives positively today.
This daguerreotype cannot settle WHETHER Joseph was a true prophet of God, but Bishop said it well: a face matters to God, and it should matter to us.
The looming question of this purported image of Joseph Smith exposes some larger goals: the desire to make sacred history tangible. To me, that is the mystery beneath the mystery—not only WHOSE face we see, but WHAT we ask, or need, that artifact to prove for us individually.
What I need it to prove is probably something different than what you need it to prove, so see the movie and read the book to piece these clues together for yourself!