May 19, 2011 - Sale 2248

Sale 2248 - Lot 38

Price Realized: $ 300
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 400 - $ 600
(PHOTOGRAPHICALLY ILLUSTRATED.)
Messina after the Great Disaster: Photographs from My Own Camera. With Explanatory Description of Each Photograph.
By W.P.B.G. (who is pictured onboard a rescue ship). Illustrated with 66 snapshots of the December 28, 1908 earthquake that struck this city in Sicily. Silver prints, most 3x4, 6 are 3 3/4x5 3/4 inches (7.6x10.2 or 9.5x14.6 cm.) and the reverse. 4to, stamped linen, soiled. first edition.
Np, 1909?
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Thomas H. Garver, a curator, collector and an author, has been involved with contemporary American art and photography for more than 50 years. He is perhaps best known for his decades-long association with O. Winston Link. Garver served as Link's part-time assistant in the mid-1950s, and made several trips with himto document the steam-powered Norfolk and Western Railway. After the dissolution of Link's marriage, Garver became the photographer's business agent.

In 1998, Garver contributed an essay to Link's first book, Steam, Steel and Stars; he was the author of The Last Steam Railroad in America, Link's second book. He was appointed organizing curator for the O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, Virginia, in 2002, the only museum devoted to the work of a single photographer in the United States.

Garver was introduced to John Szarkowski, a fellow Midwesterner, in 1960, before Szarkowski moved to New York to become photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Szarkowski loved Link's work. His quote about Link being "a legitimate American genius and nut," which appears on the dust jacket for Steam Steel and Stars, was excerpted from a letter Szarkowski wrote to Garver after meeting Link. Their friendship continued until Szarkowski's death in 2007.

In the mid-1960s, Garver organized "Twelve Photographers of the American Social Landscape," which included works by Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Duane Michaels, and Bruce Davidson, for the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University. In 1999, as founding director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now Orange County Museum of Art, CA), he organized "Just Before the War: Urban America as Seen by Photographers of the Farm Security Administration," as well as Danny Lyons' first survey exhibition. Subsequently, when he became curator of exhibitions at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco he mounted the show, "New Photography: San Francisco and the Bay Area," in 1974. Today, Garver continues to write and lecture about Link's life and work.