Photograph

CLOSING this Saturday (October 18) and not to be missed, is an exhibition of photographs by Michael Cooper at the Atlas Gallery, 49 Dorset Street, London W1. One of the great archives of 1960s photography, this show has prompted the Independent on Sunday to brand the snapper as “The Swinging Sixties’ poet of the lens”. Lennon, Magritte, Warhol, Burroughs, the Rolling Stones, Twiggy, and Hockney are all featured among the 37 photos priced from £800 to £6000.

A series of 73 stereoscopic photocards of Captain Scott’s first expedition to the Antarctic in Discovery, the National Antarctic Expedition of 1901-04, was sold at £1250 in a book, card and ephemera sale held by Acorn Auctions of Salford on September 9, where a collection of 19th century stereoscopic photographs of Sussex scenes, 51 in all, reached £200.

THOUGH the May 21 sale held by Dominic Winter was a collectors’ sale that also included motoring, maritime and railway models, photographs, prints, etc., it was the aviation material that had star billing. There was yet another selection from the Amédée Gauthier collection of photographs, arranged as before in thematic lots.

London’s main photograph auctions took place last week. The high point of the series came at Christie’s on May 20 in a single-owner evening auction of daguerreotypes by the French photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, when this image of the Temple of Olympian Zeus on the Acropolis sold for £500,000, reckoned by the auctioneers to be a new auction high for a photograph.

When Sotheby’s sold the second and third parts of Sotheby’s sale of the Jammes collection in Paris on March 21 and 22, the highest price was paid, as expected, for this exceptional collection of correspondence from the French father of photography, Nicéphore Niépce, and his son Isidore, featuring a heliographic reproduction of a Dutch print.

SOTHEBY’S have given the autograph documentation and picture, right, a hefty estimate of €500,000-750,000 for a very good reason: the picture is now thought to be the earliest image made by photographic means.

UK: A COLLECTION of carte-de-visite photographs and signatures of leading figures of the Confederacy – the South’s leader, Jefferson Davis, and military leaders, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, among them – assembled by a Captain Busby of the Calypso, an English blockade runner, was one of more competitively contested lots in this Sussex sale. The collection was finally knocked down at £3000 to Julian Browning.

UK: THE first week of May saw a rash of specialist photograph, auctions break out in England but the cream of the crop was a single-owner sale of vintage photographs collected by William, 2nd Earl of Craven (1809-1866), at Bearne’s in Exeter on May 6.

UK: THE world record auction price for a photograph was broken twice at the Sotheby’s London sale of the Photographic Collection of Marie-Thérèse and André Jammes on October 27.

Antique Phonograph Gadgets Gizmos and Gimmicks by Timothy C. Fabrizio and George F. Paul