ABSTRACT
Photography’s strong presence at the United States government displays at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition was clear testimony of Hayden’s assertion that photography was an essentially modern tool in the progressive work of government. The displays in the Government Building were carefully crafted to portray a version of national performance and government progress, as H. Craig Miner has astutely pointed out, and photography was clearly part of this image. The innocuous photograph of Charles F. Hall’s expeditionary ship “Polaris ,” taken in June, 1871 while in the Washington dry-dock, masked the drama of Hall’s own abrupt and controversial death during his third Arctic expedition. Photographic documentation of Arctic expeditionary work was just beginning to get underway at the time of the 1876 Centennial. Photographs were both an essential tool as well as a means of connecting the general public to what the government was undertaking in this highly specialized area.
