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5th Ave and 42nd St in NYC in 1910. Original image named “amerikanskie-goroda-retro-12-940×747.jpg”

Toronto. Mo Patz dropped me a note from BC yesterday. Maureen was president of our Toronto chapter which folded into the national chapter many year sago.

Mo writes, “A friend of mine in the States just sent me this e-mail that brought both of you to mind [me and John Linsky] and I thought that you might enjoy looking at them too and perhaps send them on to others to enjoy (like Mark Singers, whose e-mail I don’t have to hand)….or even you might want to print this e-mail out for the next club meeting.

“Aren’t these pix lovely? I think they are great and I couldn’t resist forwarding them to you.”

You can see the prints too at this site which is a page on Memolition – Explore. Dream. Discover. While they are all American locales, the images capture the scenes of cities in the era. The original photographs were likely taken on glass plates with field cameras on tripods (not pinhole cameras as one site mentions). Roll film was available at the time, but was most commonly used by amateurs.

The image files are all named in Russian as “America Cities, Retro” followed by a sequential number and the image size in pixels. There are many sites on the web with all or some of the same photographs down to the same file names.

Eadweard Muybridge plates on Animal Locomotion sell for $62,500 US

Toronto. I received an email the other day from Ms Daile Kaplan of Swann Galleries talking about their latest sale of photographs and books by auction.

She says, “On Valentine’s Day we offered Icons & Images: Photographs & Photobooks, precisely 65 years after Swann held the first U.S. auction dedicated to photographs. Known as The Marshall Sale, the top lot in the February 14, 1952 auction was a collection of more than 1,000 plates from Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion, which sold for just $250.

“Tuesday’s auction cleared $1.5M, with a selection of 50 plates from Muybridge’s 1887 magnum opus topping the auction at $62,500.

“Also available were multiple works by Ansel Adams, Edward S. Curtis and Roy DeCarava, and a set of 22 large prints from NASA missions that reached $43,750.”

I remember the NASA prints. I was in Montreal at the time and a woman bought some for a young family member of the celebration of the first moon walk. She kindly ordered a set for me as well. My first daughter was born that summer when America first put a man on the moon – 1969.

Stereo Photographer at 1904 Wedding

Toronto. George Dunbar turns up the most unusual sources. The other day he suggested we look a a web site for the American National Public Radio (NPR). The NPR site published this article by Colin Dwyer yesterday (February 16. 2017) called “WATCH: Is This [Marcel] Proust? Scholars Say They’ve Finally Found Author On Film“.

Included is a short movie clip taken at a 1904 wedding. Colin Dwyer says, “Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan, professor at Laval University in Quebec City, Canada, says he has found the notoriously solitary writer in footage of the 1904 wedding of Élaine Greffulhe.” This clip is courtesy of the Minstere de la Culture, Les Archives du film du Cenrew ational de la cinematographie in France.

Of even greater interest to photo historians are brief images of the photographers of the day. Early in the clip, a photographer takes hand held shots with a stereo camera, its case strapped over his shoulder. Moments later sharp eyes will see another photographer carrying a huge tripod mounted stills camera down  the stairs. Later in the movie there is a third fellow carrying a hand held bellows camera and then a fourth man slipping what looks like a movie camera or a glass plates case into its leather bag. Perhaps there are even more cameras – take a close, a really close look!

Toronto. Tonchi Martinic of the Vancouver Society sent me a note announcing the Vancouver Camera Swap Meet this coming April 2nd, 2017.

This is the show Siggi ran for many years before passing it on to Tonchi. If you can’t make it to Montreal, then by all means join the folks in Vancouver and enjoy the great spring weather (hard to believe with all the snow there just now, but by April the sun will be shining and balmy weather will have set in). Click here or on the icon for details.