Mysterious Daguerreotype Of Brooklyn NYC c. 1850 Est. $20K-$30K

by Stephen J. Gertz

A haunting, whole-plate daguerreotype of a street tableau in Brooklyn, New York City, staged and photographed c. mid-1850s, is being offered by Swann Auction Galleries on Thursday, October 17, 2013 in its Fine Photographs and Photobooks sale. It is estimated to sell for $20,000 - $30,000.

In this striking photo, a very quiet, treeless street lined with buildings of various architectural styles is populated by two enigmatic women who seem to be engaged in an entre-nous exchange at a doorway on a porch, their faces obscured, both by the distance at which the photographer was positioned and by a parasol held by the woman at left. They may know each other; they may not. One may live or work in the building, the other may be a visiting friend, business patron, or who knows and their ambiguous interaction hints of mystery and an intriguing, if inscrutable, story that begs to be deciphered.

The photo was certainly posed and not a candid snapshot. At this point in their development daguerreotypes took up to twenty minutes to expose; the women are in sharp focus; they stood there like stones until the photographer told them otherwise; this was not Candid Camera.

The owner of this daguerreotype (8.5 x 6.5 inches) purchased it with the understanding that it depicted Brooklyn, one of New York City's five boroughs. Architectural historian Francis Morrone, author of An Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn (2001), asserts that, based on fire laws of the period (which prohibited new wooden house construction), the fringed or scalloped valances which were fashionable when wooden houses were being built, and the appearance of the Greek Revival house, the daguerreotype likely depicts a scene in Greenpoint, the northernmost neighborhood of Brooklyn.

The image features three beautiful buildings bathed in sunlight, each of them rivals for our attention  asking the inevitable question the image raises and the viewer wonders: are they the real subject of the daguerreotype, or does the staged scene hint at lost moment in time? This is the central drama of the photo, what stirs the imagination and makes it so desirable to collectors.

The elaborately designed wood-frame home at left displays a brick base, two porches, a pointed roof, and an artful bargeboard, while the wood-frame house at far right is minimalist with a simple jigsaw-cut bargeboard along the underside of the top gable serving as the structure's only ornamentation. The sun, shining in from the upper left side of the image, casts delicate shadows on the wooden boards, and highlights the delicate work of the architectural style. The large modified Greek Revival building in the center has a flat brick front and brownstone trimmings around the door and windows. The small porch is decorated with two potted plants astride the stairs, each with delicate hand-colored touches of red and green.

This scarce and stunning daguerreotype - the only known copy - is reproduced in John Wood's The Daguerreotype: A Sesquicentennial Celebration (1989), where he notes that the signage on the right and left buildings' sides are legible as the office of Dr. H.B. May, the shop of J. Wood (a butcher), and a builder whose sign can be partially read. The plate was in the collection of Julian Wolff. 



With its inclusion of an ambiguous narrative within what was plainly an architectural photograph, this daguerreotype suggests the mid-twentieth century shift in fashion photography to present the clothing within a visual story often having nothing at all to do with the clothes or models yet nonetheless drawing us into an arresting image not easily forgotten, the fashions brought to life within an artificial reality. Here, the mystery women in the doorway animate the buildings and transform them into compelling characters in a secret history.

The deft composition, masterful handling of detail, insertion of figures and injection of mystery into this remarkable piece indicates that it was made by a skilled, highly imaginative photographer, alas, unknown. 

For these reasons it must be considered amongst the great American urban architectural photographs of the nineteenth century.

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Images courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries, with our thanks.
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Private Moments, Public Reading

By Alastair Johnston

Pursuant to My Last...

After writing about André Kertesz's book, On Reading, and Steve McCurry's blog post about people reading, a couple of friends posted more pictures of readers on (where else?) Facebook that are worth sharing. Kate Godfrey reminded me of the wonderful site UndergroundNewYorkPublicLibrary, which shares images of readers on the New York's subway transit system.

Reading Katie Roiphe's In Praise of Messy Lives

The images, reminiscent of Walker Evans' project The Passengers (clandestine photos taken on the New York subway between 1939 and 1941 but not published in Evans' lifetime) include identification of the book's title so you can draw your own conclusions about the person in the photo and their choice of reading matter.

Reading Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions

Evans' passengers, by the way, were only caught reading the newspaper ("PAL TELLS HOW GUNGIRL KILLED"). Another photo, posted on Facebook, of a boy reading in a bombed-out building during the London Blitz led me to a google image search.

A boy sits amid the ruins of a London bookshop following an air raid
on October 8, 1940,  reading a book titled 'The History of London.'

This image led me to another biblio-site, called Needful Books, a google community where people are encouraged to post their own photos of books. This photo, posted by Michael Allen on 20 May 2013, is purportedly of a boy reading The History of London. There are other images of books and bookstores that will delight Booktryst readers, and more readers, shared by Mr Allen:

Posted by tanphoto on flickr

Obviously this could lead from here back into historic images of readers. I assumed that in the early days of photography when exposures took a minute or more, photographers would have used books as props quite often, but a cursory glance through the bookshelf shows this not to be the case. There is a lovely shot of a reader in the latest monograph on Clementina, Lady Hawarden, by Virginia Dodier (Aperture, n.d. [1999]) but that reader is soundly asleep. Recently another collection of Lady Hawarden's prints came to light and was auctioned in London. The album contains another reading portrait from the 1860s, one of her daughters, also named Clementina, "reading," but it looks as if the young lady is nodding off.

And to prove, once again, that the old guys stole all our best ideas, here is a favorite image by Alexander Rodchenko, a portrait of his mother from 1924:

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Of Related Interest:

Photographers on Reading.
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Photographers On Reading

By Alastair Johnston

Who doesn't love a good book? And in our image-saturated society, who doesn't love a good photo of someone else reading? The Hungarian photographer André Kertész (1894-1985) published a book of sixty-three candid black and white photos of people reading, called appropriately enough ON READING (New York, Grossman, 1971). 

It celebrated the universal joy of reading in a poetic elegy of private moments made public. Kertész gained recognition as a photographer and was able to travel the world and always when the opportunity arose made snapshots of readers for his project. 

Since it began in 1915 with a group of three boys reading in his native Hungary, it's clear Kertész came to think of it as a century-long project! Kertész died in 1985, but his work endures. A gift of 120 of his reading photos was the basis for an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago in 2006. More recently, in 2009, his work was celebrated at the Photographers' Gallery in London, and in 2011 the Carnegie Museum of Art hosted an exhibit of his "Reading" pictures.

To me it's odd that as recently as 1971 -- which is in some people's living memory, though still B.C. (Before Computers) -- the world was black and white. But more specifically the world of fine art photography was black and white, and for some collectors and curators remains so.

Photojournalism has changed a lot in the last generation, just as reading has. Now artists like Alex Webb and Steve McCurry regularly dazzle us with news photos that are works of art in their own right. Webb works in the margins: he likes the places where borders exist and throw up societal conflict. He responds to chaos in spots where most of us are disconcerted and the last thing we want to do is pull out a camera and start getting in people's faces, like at a funeral in Haiti. He has a painter's eye, gets the tropical colors, scorched shadows & dramatic cropping effortlessly into the frame and manages to tell a story at the same time. And one of the most visually striking parts of Webb's work is its richly saturated color. He says,

As I understand it, one of the tenets of Goethe’s theory of color is that color emerges from the tension between light and dark, a notion that seems to resonate with my use of color, with its intense highlights and deep shadows. Also, my photographs are often a little enigmatic — there’s sometimes a sense of mystery, of ambiguity.

He makes it sound simple! But then he is capable, in his books, of taking Cartier-Bresson and Lee Friedlander to another level, through his use of color.

National Gee has long fostered talented photographers. There's a whole new bunch to watch, including Michael Wolf (who started out at GEO in Germany, but now works in Hong Kong) and David Liittschwager, who takes Avedon-like portraits of endangered creatures. The most celebrated, and with good reason, is the spectacularly gifted Steve McCurry. He is an unassuming bloke, a face in the crowd, which is a good asset for a street photographer: Someone you might see loitering on a bridge and not think, "A perv, call the cops!" He's just hanging out, waiting for that moment when the flower seller rows his boat underneath. He's there every day -- as long as it takes -- and, after ten days, the light is right, a slight haze, even the water wants to look good, everything comes together and he gets the shot. One photograph. A very Zen exercise. But how many times have you missed the shot, because your mind wasn't there in the moment, or your reflexes weren't quick enough? But people reading are in their own time and space, and that is all the time in the world for them -- suspended over the abyss of an author's black words in a limitless white expanse, the white of the page blending into the sparkling scrim behind their eyes -- as well as for the observant to capture their portrait. 

McCurry has updated Kertész, and he does it with such aplomb: it's on his blog which he regularly fills with masterpieces as if he were just dealing cards but somehow hitting full house after flush after Aces and Kings. And as he travels the world, adding images to his own "People Reading" category, it's gratifying to see that books and newspapers are still crucial to people's lives.

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