Antique Daguerreotype Photographs
Say Cheese! How Bad Photography Has Changed Our Definition of Good Pictures
By Ben Marks — “Art is like a joke, either you get it or you don’t.” So it was explained to me in the late 1970s by photographer Randy Eriksen, whose cheeky observation about the importance of context to one’s appreciation of either comedy or art could have been a parenthetical second subtitle for author and educator Kim Beil’s “Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography” (Stanford University Press, 2020). Beil’s episodic and highly readable book identifies 50 photographic trends—illustrated by...
True West: Searching for the Familiar in Early Photos of L.A. and San Francisco
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — In 1851, a few years after the start of California's Gold Rush, an unknown photographer assembled their equipment on a small hill near the port of San Francisco. Working carefully in the bright afternoon light, they created a panoramic series of daguerreotypes depicting the waterfront neighborhood with its scenic natural backdrop. The resulting set of shadowy, bronze-tinted images comprises some of the earliest photos taken in the storied new state of California, and gave many curious...
The Bromance, Found in Vintage Photography
By Lisa Hix — Blogger Maria Popova, who runs the wonderfully eclectic Brain Pickings site, unearthed this gem of a book, "Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918," by David Deitcher. These photos prove that the phenomenon of the "bromance" existed—well before Brad Pitt and George Clooney, Lance Armstrong and Matthew McConaughey, or Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. To me, one of the more heartbreaking aspects of American culture has always been the way ideas about "tough guy"...
Daile Kaplan of Swann Auction Galleries on Collecting 20th Century Photographs
By Maribeth Keane, Collectors Weekly Staff — Swann, which is New York City’s oldest specialty auction house, was founded in the late 1940s as an antiquarian book house. In the mid-1970s, as popular interest in photography became more widespread, the specialist at that time realized that Swann should have sales that featured documentary and fine art photography as well as albums and photobooks. Until that time, auctions dedicated to photography and photo literature were unheard of. Therefore, Swann is considered a pioneer of the...
From Ambrotypes to Stereoviews, 150 Years of Photographs
By Maribeth Keane — We both come from families that had collections and we both had collections as children. Jack lost his when his grandmother threw them out at one point. His grandmother collected china and glass. My parents had collections. When we married, we had both studied photography. In Chicago, we hardly ever saw any photographs. We went to antique shops and we prowled around in flea markets and the malls, but we mostly bought Victorian furniture and decorative things – stained glass windows and...
19th-Century Photographs, from Daguerreotypes to Cartes de Visites
By Dave Margulius — I’ve always been interested in antiques. As a kid, I collected a variety of stuff – fossils, rocks, minerals, natural history stuff, Indian artifacts and antiques. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and my mother had a lot of Victorian antiques. We lived in an old Victorian neighborhood, one of Louisville’s old traditional neighborhoods. In the 1910s and ’20s it had been very vibrant, but started to go downhill after World War II when people moved to the suburbs. It was a natural place for...