Is early American images coming into sharper focus?

From the April 2026 concern of Apollo.

Photography arrived within the United States on the similar second because the railroads and the telegraph. On 30 September 1839, New York’s Morning Herald reported, ‘We saw, the other day, in Chilton’s in Broadway, a really curious specimen of the brand new mode, not too long ago invented by Louis Daguerre in Paris, of taking up copper the precise resemblance of scenes and residing objects, via the medium of the solar’s rays mirrored in a digicam obscura.’ The course of by which this ‘daguerreotype’ picture was produced – in all probability by an Englishman, D.W. Seager – had been introduced in Paris barely 9 months earlier. By December, François Fauvel Gouraud, agent for artwork restorers turned camera-makers Alphonse Giroux & Cie, was on the town, displaying photographs made by Louis Daguerre himself and demonstrating the expertise.

The nation itself was solely 63 years previous, within the throes of fast enlargement and turbulent with completely different visions for its future. Photography grew to become the medium via which the nation started to confront itself. Daguerreotypes, the cheaper, faster tin-types, ambrotypes, platinum prints, silver albumen prints, silver gelatin prints, stereographs and cyanotypes have been produced everywhere in the nation; topics ranged from particular person and household portraits to the spectacular landscapes of the Western states, the bloody battles of the Civil War, the brutalities of slavery and the displacement of Native Americans. And whereas the medium grew to become an important instrument of scientific enquiry, it more and more shone as an artwork type.  

Last yr the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted the exhibition ‘The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910’, which featured greater than 250 images drawn from the museum’s William L. Schaeffer Collection. Schaeffer, a images seller, amassed his assortment over 45 years; it accommodates greater than 700 American images and albums from 1839 to the 1910s. These embody each early masters of the style and works by a whole lot of beforehand unknown practitioners, reflecting the large potentialities of the images marketplace for collectors – the sheer number of material, the completely different factors of entry (aesthetic, historic or technical) for fans, and the vary of value factors.

Few collectors are so eclectic. Traditionally, collectors of American images have targeted on establishing a chronological illustration of the historic peaks of the artwork type. This may embody daguerreotype portraits by the Boston studio Southworth & Hawes, adopted by the Civil War images of Matthew B. Brady, Alexander Gardner, George N. Barnard and Andrew J. Russell and the Western survey images of Carleton E. Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Timothy H. O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, in addition to notable albums resembling Edward S. Curtis’s documenting of The North American Indian (1907–30). As Darius Himes, head of Christie’s images division, explains, ‘The auction world is mostly governed by the sale of known works by known names. We generally are not breaking new ground when it comes to identifying artists from the historical record.’ 

According to Emily Bierman, head of Sotheby’s images division, this market took off within the mid Nineties, as collectors in America shifted focus from early European images. She notes excessive factors resembling a outstanding half-plate daguerreotype portrait of Boston service provider Samuel Appleton (1853) by Southworth & Hawes, in excellent situation, which offered for $409,000 in opposition to a $60,000–$90,000 estimate at Sotheby’s New York in 2008. The sitter’s standing can drastically improve the worth of portraits: in 2017 a half-plate daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States, taken in 1843, fetched $360,500 in opposition to a $150,000–$250,000 estimate at Sotheby’s New York. A cased quarter-plate daguerreotype from 1846 of the formidable Dolley Madison, the primary ever {photograph} of a First Lady, taken by John Plumbe Jr, achieved $456,000 in 2024, greater than six occasions the excessive estimate of $70,000. Bierman says, ‘Having a known artist added to the value. But it was an iconic subject.’ More not too long ago, a panoramic view of Yosemite Falls in daylight by Watkins offered inside estimate for $180,000 in January final yr, in Sotheby’s New York sale ‘Art of the Americas, Featuring the American West’.

For Bierman, the best problem to the market is ‘lack of supply of great photographs, oversupply of bad photographs’. Himes concurs: ‘Masterpieces are what are in demand, whether by Watkins or Edward Curtis, or early Alfred Stieglitz. What has shifted from the 1980s is that there are no longer flea markets or forgotten bookstores with boxes of photographs sitting around. The internet changed all of that, so it’s a distinct sort of hunt now.’ Another supply of change is generational: ‘The people who were buying in the 1980s and 1990s are in their eighties and nineties, so whole collections are either being donated to museums (and coming off the market) or being sold again.’ The Lynn and Yann Maillet Collection of greater than 200 daguerreotypes, auctioned final summer time at Christie’s New York, ‘was 95 per cent sold, with a huge number of new collectors participating’. Himes provides, ‘Two years ago, we sold privately a massive album of Watkins mammoth-plate photographs for mid seven figures.’

Institutional shopping for has slowed, which the New York seller Charles Isaacs says is partly due to the wonderful job museum curators have achieved over the past 30 years ‘building collections of historically important, aesthetically great images’, but additionally as a result of ‘There is so much uncertainty in the museum world currently about whether there is any funding for acquisitions.’ He notes ‘some action’ within the non-public market, nevertheless, within the humbler space of nameless daguerreotypes, cartes de visite, stereographs and tintypes. 

Hans P. Kraus, one other New York seller, has additionally observed a resurgence of curiosity in daguerreotypes from youthful collectors and artists. There continues to be some market, he thinks, for nice basic photographs and albums – resembling an album of 25 mammoth-plate views of Yosemite by Watkins he offered three years in the past, or the enduring mammoth-plate picture of a lone pine tree in Yosemite taken by Charles Leander Weed in 1864, which Kraus might be taking to the AIPAD Photography Show in April. Kraus can even take a curiosity: a whole-plate tintype of a railroad telegraph automotive with three males sitting at a telegraph machine, ‘with a huge American flag behind them’. He notes robust curiosity in nameless images well-composed and in good situation, coping with topics such because the American Gold Rush, together with photographs of or taken by African Americans.

Dealer Michael Lee confirms a vigorous curiosity in imagery as soon as used to combat for the abolition of slavery. A print of ‘The Scourged Back’, essentially the most well-known of all Civil War-era portraits of enslaved folks – attributed to McPherson & Oliver and brought in 1863 at a camp of Union troopers alongside the Mississippi River, the place the escaped slave referred to as Gordon had taken refuge – went for $75,000 at New York’s Swann Auction Galleries in 2023, in opposition to an estimate of $10,000–$15,000. Lee notes robust progress in lower-value historic photographs of slavery and plantations and cartes de visite of Sojourner Truth and different abolitionists. He additionally factors out that within the Lynn and Yann Maillet Collection sale it was vivid, clear nameless photographs of bizarre folks – a whisky maker, an explorer, a tutor – that made many occasions their estimates. He suggests that there’s an image-led market, but additionally ‘a difficult history market’ led by these decided that ‘we will not lose these things’.

From the April 2026 concern of Apollo.