?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,500
(SPANISH AMERICAN WAR--PHILIPPINES) A collection of 40 humanistic photographs by Perley Fremont Rockett, the official photographer of the Twentieth Kansas Regiment. Depicting a broad array of subjects, many of which are published in Rockett's 1899 monograph, Our Boys in the Philippines. The photographs capture the war-stricken Philippines in a way that posits the disastrous events and unyielding destruction of land and infrastructure alongside the daily lives of the country's inhabitants. From "insurgents" captured at Pasay and others portrayed "dead as they fell," and a nighttime scene of Manila burning; to depictions of intimate local life, battalions of firing soldiers, a formal portrait of Emilio Aguinaldo (former president of the Philippines), and a few images showing U.S. officials such as George Dewey (Admiral of the Navy) and General Frederick "Fearless Freddie" Funston, dubbed the "hero of the Philippines" for his gutsy plans and capture of President Aguinaldo. Printing-out paper prints, the images measuring 5x7 inches (12.7x17.8 cm.), and the reverse, many with Rockett's copyright credit and date and/or inventory number in the negative, and most with detailed captions, in pencil, on verso. Circa 1899
Rockett, an accomplished professional photographer, captured these photographs not only with crisp clarity and keen composition, but with an active consideration of the narrative capabilities of a democratic photograph.
In 1899 Rockett published Our Boys in the Philippines which reproduced a number of the photographs offered here in this collection. In 1951 Edward Steichen included three of Rockett's photographs in the Museum of Modern Art show entitled Forgotten Photographers.
