Sometimes the most familiar things, studied closely and contemplated fully, can offer up new information and even, in the best circumstances, new wisdom.

Consider Abraham Lincoln, the face that launched a thousand stories. Other than George Washington and Jesus Christ, his is perhaps the most recognizable visage in American culture. Because of that, through a series of well-thumbed catch phrases, we think we know him: Won the Civil War; freed the slaves; grew up in a log cabin and taught himself to read; fell to an assassin's bullet.

Now comes a new book called "Lincoln, Life-Size" that upends, startlingly, our notion that we completely understand Abraham Lincoln. It does so not through words — and not merely through pictures, precisely — but by taking Lincoln photographs both familiar and obscure and magnifying them in search of clues of the man behind the legend.

The Kunhardts, two sons and a father who have steeped themselves in Lincoln for years, proceed on the premise that the face of the first president to be photographed extensively can provide a window into meaning. They're onto something.

"It is a face that still matters to us all these years later," they write, "the backwoods toughness still visible but transmuted by time and fate into a face of refined sensibleness."

To gaze at the pictures, blown up to coffee-table-book proportions, is to truly see Lincoln the man for perhaps the first time.

In 1846, in Springfield, Ill., he looks fresh-faced and gentle, with only hints of the cragginess that would become his hallmark. Upon seeing this photo many years after Lincoln died, one of his friends, Henry C. Whitney, wrote that it "dispels the illusion so common (but never shared by me) that Mr. Lincoln was an ugly-looking man."

In 1857, in Danville, Ill., he looks determined and well-groomed, ready with squared jaw for anything that comes down the pike.

In 1860, in Springfield, he looks scattered and shifty and — dare we say — plagued by bed head and in need of a comb. In the midst of a presidential campaign, this is not a man who would have done well in today's televised debates.

But the most intriguing examples of watching Lincoln's face evolve happen, predictably, during the Civil War. Its bloody toll unfolds not only upon the battlefield but upon his face.

In the spring of 1861, his beard new to his chin, he sits with a stoic, expectant look a few days after he had rejected peace on any terms. In 1863, shortly after the Battle of Gettysburg, he radiates a cool leadership. By 1864 the topography of his face is more weathered. And by the final known photograph of him — March 6, 1865, barely a month before he was assassinated — he appears almost ethereal as both his death and the South's surrender approach.

The photographs collected by the Kunhardts do exactly what historical research is supposed to do: They reopen debate upon something that happened long ago and explore whether our long-held beliefs are accurate or need to be rethought.

"Lincoln, Life-Size" (Knopf, 208 pages, $50), by Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt and Peter W. Kunhardt Jr.