(OCCUPATIONALS) Remarkable collection

Sale 2115 - Lot 219

Price Realized: $ 16,800

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000

(OCCUPATIONALS)
Remarkable collection of 220 photographs, most of them unique or one-of-a-kind, comprising tintypes, daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and assorted paper images. With approximately 150 tintypes of laborers, scientists, photographers, and working women, including a pair of serial Victorian fashion studies depicting a well-dressed couple. Features tintypes in the following approximate sizes: 2 half-plates, 111 sixth-plates, 19 quarter-plates, and 7 ninth plates as well as 12 cased or matted tintypes (comprising 6 sixth-plates, 2 quarter-plates and 4 ninth-plates); 20 hard images, comprising 3 daguerreotypes (one quarter-plate, sixth-plate, and ninth plate) and 17 ambrotypes (5 quarter-plates, 11 sixth-plates, and one ninth-plate); plus 50 paper images, composed of 2 boudoir cards, 26 cabinet cards, 20 cartes-de-visite, and 2 albumen photographs. 1860s-1890s

Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

From the collection of Ken Heyman, a noted photographer and author of 40 books, including Family (with Dr. Margaret Mead), who completed 150 assignments for Life magazine. The photographs were acquired during the golden age of photography collecting, the 1970s-early 1980s. Numerous images from the lot were reproduced in Michael Carlebach's, working stiffs (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), a pictorial survey of occupational portraits.

Like other "hard images," such as daguerreotypes and ambrotypes, tintypes are unique or one-of-a-kind images; they were cheap, fast, and easy to make. The historical term "tintype" is actually a misnomer since the image itself appears on iron (not tin). Hence, tintypes are also known as ferrotypes or melainotypes.

Tintypes represent the democratization of photography insofar as they were modestly priced photographs that appealed to middle- and working-class consumers from the 1860s-early 1900s. Itinerant and studio photographers created photographs demonstrating the pride men and women had in their vocation, and depict subjects proudly displaying the tools of their trade.