Apr 17, 2014 - Sale 2345

Sale 2345 - Lot 20

Price Realized: $ 1,188
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 700 - $ 1,000
(NEW YORK)
Amateur photographer's album with 22 prints, including scenes of Manhattan and Central Park. A group enjoys an excursion on a boat shaped like a swan, plus views of City Hall, street laborers, a sideshow tent, well-dressed children, and a train ride up the Hudson, where a mill set in a pastoral landscape precedes two pictures of gushing waterfalls. Albumen prints, 3 3/4x4 3/4 inches (9.5x12.1 cm.), with the initials L.C.B. in plate #1. Square 8vo, cloth, rebound; with the original label. Late 1880s

Additional Details

George Eastman's cameras resulted in a kind of cultural revolution, one in which taking pictures emerged as a new national obsession. Indeed, the novelty of the camera was not lost on this photographer. He or she used it well, to snap llamas and ostriches at the zoo or unaware children talking or playing games. They also captured something new: the poignancy of laborers' (read: strangers) hard-scrabble lives and the anonymity of the street. In many ways, the curiosity with which the photographer politely photographed people speaks to the special qualities of the quintessential New Yorker.