• Navigation
  • Home
  • Search Photos
  • Photographers
  • Special Sale
  • Photo Exhibits
  • Member Dealers
  • Collecting
  • Newsletter
  • Calendar
  • Photo Links

• Archive Newsletters
• Issue #199
• Article

Be-hold will conduct an online-only auction of photographs, plus some prints on November 25. All the material as well as bidding information is presented on the Be-hold.com website at: http://be-hold.com/ .

The photograph selections include exciting material from the daguerreian era through photographs by major 20th-century photographers.

A large body of material deals with the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960's, with an important offering of vintage prints by Flip Schulke, purchased directly from him from his personal archive. These iconic images include photographs of Martin Luther King, whom Schulke befriended early in King’s career. Accompanying these Schulke photographs are photographs of related events by Danny Lyon, James Karales and Bob Henriques.

Other important documentary photographs include vintage images of the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassination of a North Vietnamese, and important D-Day Invasion photographs by Robert Capa, including an original wire photograph from 1944.

The Schulke material includes a large range of his work aside from the Civil Rights subjects. There is a strong selection of photographs of the young Cassius Clay, whom Schulke befriended when Clay was still relatively unknown. These include the famous photographs of Clay training under water.

There is also a Clay/Muhammad Ali photograph by Gordon Parks, and a large knockout framed color photograph of Ali after he knocked out Cleveland Williams, by Neil Leifer, as well as a large photograph by Leifer of Ali with his friend the announcer Howard Cosell.

Another major boxing photograph is a huge framed vintage photograph of Jack Johnson being counted out in the knockout by Jess Willard in Havana, 1915.

A Schulke photograph of pitcher Satchel Paige in his Negro League uniform is included in the offerings of black sports figures that complements the Civil Rights material.

An interesting offering is a set of 32 chromogenic prints that appear to have been copied from dye transfer prints experimentally produced around 1980 from the negatives made by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii from 1909-1915, that are milestones in the history of color photography, as well as records of beautiful scenes in the vast Russian Empire of that period. The negatives themselves are in the Library of Congress. There seems to be no record of these beautiful dye transfer prints other than these copies. There are also large black-and-white gelatin silver prints that have been copied at the same time from albumen prints in albums also in the Library of Congress.

Photographs by 20th-century photographers include works by Alvin Langdon Coburn, Roman Vishniac, Margaret Bourke-White, Weegee, William Klein, Bill Witt and Lucien Clergue. A unique set of photographs by Annie Leibowitz were colored over with marker as trials for the creation of the cover of the 1980 record album "Catholic Boy" by the Jim Carroll Band.

Early material includes an interesting selection of daguerreotypes and other cased images. A whole-plate daguerreotype of an identified grandmother and granddaughter was made in Havana by the Swedish photographer Beurling, who operated in Cuba in the mid-1850's. There is a lovely portrait of a Southern Belle from Savanna, GA by Preston M. Cary. There are four stereoscopic daguerreotypes, including a fabulous erotic genre image of a gent smoking a hookah, oblivious of a lovely slave girl who pours him wine. There is another erotic stereo daguerreotype by Belloc, and an overview of Toulouse. A terrific colored tintype enacts a tooth extraction.

There are salted paper scenes and portraits, including one of Henry Clay, cdvs of Lincoln, and cabinet cards of Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde and Fredrick Douglass.

A number of lots are presented with fabulous frames. Aside from the famous Margeret Bourke-White "Airship Akron" in its aluminum frame (a bright clean copy) attention should be paid to the Gjon Mili photograph of Duke Ellington that has been uniquely framed with piano keys, and a photograph of Mao Zedong playing ping pong that is presented in a bright red mat in a golden frame.

Aside from the photographs, there is an important selection of 1830's colored lithographs by McKenney and Hall of Indians.

This is an on-line only auction, with no printed catalog. The Salmagundi Club is undergoing renovation, so there will be no usual week-long preview, but arrangements can be made to view the material in Yonkers or in the greater New York area. Call 1-914-423-5806, or email behold@be-hold.com .

Aside from online bidding, arrangements can also be made to bid directly or by phone. All the material as well as bidding information is presented on the Be-hold.com website at: http://be-hold.com/ .