CECIL, Pa. – The Daguerreian Society brings together collectors who have a passion for early photography of all types. The nonprofit organization will conduct its annual auction of exceptional photographica on Saturday, Oct. 28, in conjunction with its 2017 Washington, D.C. Symposium. The public is invited to participate in the auction. Absentee and Internet bidding is available through LiveAuctioneers.
The auction features rare and unusual images including daguerreotypes. The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process (1839-1860) in the history of photography. Named after the inventor, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, each daguerreotype is a unique image on a silvered copper plate.
Choice daguerreotypes offered in this year’s auction are a portrait of a proud hunter with a gun and his dog (above) and a touching image man and a young boy (below). The former is elevated by the flesh tones of the man, the brown tones of the dog, in addition to the warm pose and strong content.
The latter portrait is a mirror image of a daguerreotype in the collection of William Becker, curator and owner of the online American Museum of Photography. Becker’s daguerreotype was identified by a note as “Uncle Geo. and Gus.” Becker’s daguerreotype image appears on page 106 of Daguerre’s American Legacy: Photographic Portraits (1840-1900) from the Wm. B. Becker Collection by Francois Brunet & Wm. B. Becker.
A fitting image for Halloween is a large tintype of a person wearing a bizarre grinning mask. A tintype is a photograph made by creating a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal coated with a dark lacquer or enamel. Tintypes enjoyed their widest use during the 1860s and 1870s.
From the turn of the 20th century is a group of four images of Inuit People taken by American photographer Beverly Dobbs. The photographs picture a man in profile holding model of a wooden boat, a family of three with their dog (below), a portrait of a man wearing beads and native attire and another man holding small tool.
Beverly Bennett Dobbs was born in 1868 near Marshall, Missouri. At age 8, he moved with his parents to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he learned photography. In 1888, Dobbs moved to Bellingham, Washington, and operated a photography studio for 12 years. He moved to Nome, Alaska, in search of gold in 1900. Dobbs continued to earn his living as a photographer, photographing scenes in Nome and the Seward Peninsula and made portraits of Inuit people. He was awarded a gold medal at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 for his Eskimo photographs. (From the Archives West: Orbis Cascade Alliance website.)
The largest items in the auction are two John Rogers plaster statues, which were immensely popular in late 19th-century. It is said that the statues titled The Photographer and The Sitter are the only Rogers statues that consists of two parts. An identical set reportedly sold in 2011 at a Fontaine’s auction in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for $3,600.
The auction will begin Saturday, Oct. 28, at 8:30 p.m.
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