Antique and Vintage 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...
A Garage Sale Find of Rare Beatles Photos Took a Collector on a Magical Mystery Tour
By Ben Marks — With apologies to John Lennon’s 1967 hippie anthem, “All You Need Is Love,” there’s nothing you can know about the Beatles that isn’t known. For serious Beatles fans, there are half a dozen or more books devoted to the band’s formative years in Hamburg, Germany, while no detail is too trivial when it comes to the group's triumphant conquest of the former colonies at the height of Beatlemania. And if you have an appetite for gossip concerning the band's acrimonious dissolution at the end of...
Roadside Curiosities: Things That Make You Go "What the Heck?"
By Lisa Hix — In the introduction to his new self-published book of vernacular photography and tourist postcards, "In Situ: American Folk Art in Place," archivist and collector Jim Linderman, who's known for his Dull Tool Dim Bulb blog, warns that these images he's gathered "don't belong together at all. My arbitrary curating criteria is a falsehood." "You know, he is kind of eccentric, and his yard is full of all sorts of things." Yet his oddball collection makes perfect sense: When wandering North...
Like Iggy Pop? Thank Your Grandparents
By Lisa Hix — If you had to choose an image to define “rock ’n’ roll,” what would it be? Elvis’ pompadour? A psychedelic rock poster? A Flying V guitar? The last thing you might picture is a young woman in the Great Depression, wearing her Sunday best, smiling modestly as she poses with her saxophone. But when Jim Linderman, a collector of vernacular photography and folk art, finds a photograph like that, he sees the seeds of the rebellious music known as rock. Linderman, an author and former librarian...
Royalty, Espionage, and Erotica: Secrets of the World's Tiniest Photographs
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Mary finished her embroidery, tucking her needle away into its handsome ivory case. Before slipping the case into her sewing kit, Mary held it up to the light of a nearby window, and peered into a tiny glass lens embedded in the ivory. She smiled at the secret photograph of her favorite place—London's Crystal Palace. In the next room, her husband, John, checked the time on his pocket watch. Making sure Mary was out of sight, John lifted the watch chain to his eye, stealing a peek at a tiny...
The Struggle in Black and White: Activist Photographers Who Fought for Civil Rights
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — July marked the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, a groundbreaking piece of legislation that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Yet after half a century of adjustment to a world where such discrimination is illegal, the United States still hasn’t overcome its legacy of racism. Photographs and videos taken in Ferguson, Missouri, during the past few months bear a chilling resemblance to the images of protests, riots, and police clashes in...
Black Glamour Power: The Stars Who Blazed a Trail for Beyoncé and Lupita Nyong'o
By Lisa Hix — Nichelle Gainer knows a thing or two about glamour: She spent most of her career working for magazines like “Woman’s Day,” “GQ,” “Us Weekly,” and “InStyle,” with a focus on celebrity, fashion, and grooming. But her true passion is fiction, so she decided to write a novel about black beauty pageants in the 1950s, partially inspired by one of her two glamorous aunts, who was a model in the 1950s—the other was an opera singer who rubbed shoulders with the biggest celebrities of her day. "If...
In Living Color: The Forgotten 19th-Century Photo Technology that Romanticized America
By Ben Marks — Every few centuries, someone rediscovers America. After the first humans arrived from Asia roughly 15,000 years ago, Vikings touched down in Newfoundland in the year 1000. Half a millennium later, Christopher Columbus spotted a small island in what is now the Bahamas, and in 1769, Gaspar de Portolà was the first European to gaze upon San Francisco Bay, whose indigenous people had remained hidden behind a thick wall of fog throughout most of America’s Colonial era. “Photochroms were a...
Who Were the First Teenagers?
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Long before the cynical Millennials, the snarky Brat Pack, and bad-boy greasers of the 1950s, teenagers were finding their own voices—and using them to scream at their elders. Most historians pin the origins of teen culture to the 1950s, when adults first noticed that adolescents were dictating trends in fashion, music, film, and more. But director Matt Wolf's latest film, called simply "Teenage," challenges the notion that this turbulent, in-between life stage is a modern...
Take That, Instagram: The Enduring Allure of Vintage Snapshots
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — In an essay for her 1977 series "On Photography," Susan Sontag wrote that "photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing, which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art." Yet today, found or "vernacular" photographs are increasingly presented as art objects, a reverence reinforced by the steady transition from analog to digital technology. These visual time capsules attract us with their physical beauty...
Abandoned Suitcases Reveal Private Lives of Insane Asylum Patients
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — If you were committed to a psychiatric institution, unsure if you'd ever return to the life you knew before, what would you take with you? That sobering question hovers like an apparition over each of the Willard Asylum suitcases. From the 1910s through the 1960s, many patients at the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane left suitcases behind when they passed away, with nobody to claim them. Upon the center's closure in 1995, employees found hundreds of these time capsules stored in a...
Photos From the Front: Veterans You Love
By Lisa Hix — Today, America honors its military veterans, who have served our country in times of war and peace. If you want to delve in the human side of our U.S. military history, look no further than Show & Tell, where militaria collectors like scottvez share their collections and knowledge about hats, medals, and badges, as well as photos, letters, and trench art they've stumbled across. Many Show & Tellers—U.S. veterans and families of veterans—have been generous enough to share their personal...
Found Photos: When Rock Lost Its Innocence
By Ben Marks — On February 26, 1955, a Cleveland deejay named Tommy Edwards became the first music promoter to book a Southern singing sensation named Elvis Presley north of the Mason-Dixon line. The event was the Hillbilly Jamboree at Cleveland's Circle Theater. That fall, Edwards brought Presley back to the Cleveland area for several more shows, including one on October 20, 1955, at Brooklyn High School. On that date, Pat Boone was the headliner (“Ain’t That a Shame” was his big hit), with Elvis,...
The Woman Behind Bettie Page
By Ben Marks — From 1952 to 1957, a not-so-shy model and camera-club girl named Bettie Page worked for a New York City men’s magazine publisher named Irving Klaw. His younger sister Paula was the photographer and director of the black-haired beauty, who posed for the bondage and fetish photography market that Irving helped create. Though mostly tame by 21st century standards, many of the Page images would be considered very disturbing even today. Little wonder, then, that along with comic books and...
The Day Johnny Cash Flipped Off Jim Marshall
By Ben Marks — Photographer Jim Marshall, who grew up in San Francisco’s Fillmore district in the 1940s and '50s, and passed away in March of 2010, was one of the preeminent chroniclers of the rock, blues, and jazz musicians of 20th century America. Marshall had amazing access, capturing the Beatles during their last performance at Candlestick Park, as well as Janis Joplin backstage at Winterland, a bottle of Southern Comfort in her hand. He attended the best of the 1960s music festivals, from Newport Folk...
Total Immersion Collecting: Baptism Photos
By Jim Linderman — Collecting anything is fun—somehow any group of objects always equals more than the sum of its parts. Personally, I prefer groups of three. That’s enough to show differences and similarities at the same time. But there is another reason to collect, and to collect specifically in a narrow category: Your efforts could wind up in a museum. An exhibition called “Take Me to the Water: Photographs of River Baptisms,” which was curated by Erin Barnett, assistant curator of collections at the...
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...