Sotheby's Withdraws Potentially Historic Image from Auction--For Now

It looks like it will take a little bit longer to rewrite the photo history books. I just got off the phone with Denise Bethel, director of photographer at Sotheby’s in New York, and she told me that a controversial image that was to have been included in a sale next Monday has been withdrawn from the auction. According to at least one historian, the image could prove that photography was invented not in 1939 1839, the date commonly given for the birth of the medium, but nearly 30 years prior to that.
    In the past few days the photo world has been buzzing about the image, a “photogenic drawing” (above) that until now has been attributed to the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot and dated 1839. However, the Sotheby’s catalog attributed the image to “Photographer Unknown” and included an essay by photo history Larry J. Schaaf speculating that the image was in fact may by Thomas Wedgewood “in 1805 or earlier.” Wedgewood was a member of the family famed for making fine china and was known for experimenting with photographic processes.
     When the essay appeared, it stirred up a hornet’s nest of commentary from other historians. “We knew this was going to happen,” said Bethel. “We knew that if we put it out there we would get this discussion going.” With more speculation dribbling in, Sotheby’s decided to postpone the sale of the image until further clarification of its origins could be made. This doesn’t mean that Schaaf was wrong in his assertions. It does mean, however, that in the next weeks and months we are going to be learning a lot more about the birth of photography.

There’s no doubt that the provenance of the image in question is strictly blue-chip, passing from the Henry Bright Collection in England to the private New York photo dealer Hans P. Kraus Jr. to the Quillan Company Collection, a private investment group, which acquired it in 1989 as part of its important collection of 19th and 20th Century photography. (The Sotheby’s sale on Monday is devoted entirely to material from the Quillan Collection. Go here for a preview.)
     All along, the image was attributed to Fox Talbot, who, along with Frenchman Louis Daguerre, is considered one of the "fathers" of photography. “This idea that the image was made by Wedgewood was totally new the Jill Quasha, the private dealer who put together the Quillan Collection,” said Bethel. “When she bought the image she was told it was a Talbot.”
      The image is a “photogenic drawing”—a process that Talbot popularized after 1839, as Schaaf notes in his essay. “Following Talbot’s instructions, an experimenter had only to take a sheet of writing paper, soak it in a weak solution of common table salt, and then brush it with silver nitrate. Light sensitive silver chloride would be formed within the fibers of the paper. The light sensitive paper would then be placed in the sun under a leaf or other object and within minutes the energy of the light would reduce the silver chloride to tiny particles of silver, appearing red or purple. The image was a negative, of course, for where the object blocked the light, nothing happened, but where the light reached around or through the object, the paper darkened.” Unless fixed, such light drawings would be destroyed by further exposure to the sun, which is why much of this type of material does not exist today.
     The image in the Quillan Collection was never fixed. It is kept in the dark, and Sotheby’s uses a facsimile to show it as part of the collection. It is one of six photogenic drawings from an album by an Englishman named Henry Bright. According to Bethel, two of the other images from the set are owned by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
      In his essay, Schaaf says that five of the six images, including the one in the Quillan Collection, are inscribed with an ink “W” in the lower right corner.
     Thomas Wedgewood has long been known for his experimentation with photographic processes. Schaaf writes in his essay that Wedgewood worked on photogenic processes, “placing leaves and other objects on silver nitrate coated paper and white leather to form negative images,” much as Talbot did years later. Many other people experimented with photographic processes prior to Talbot. “Until now I didn’t know so many people before 1839 were doing all this,” Bethel said.
     Schaaf’s ideas struck a chord with other photo historians—professionals and amateur alike, who air their opinions on a Yahoo discussion group and other websites. “There are people who are calling us with little bits of information, and Larry Schaaf himself has opened up some new avenues of research that were impossible for him to get to before we went to press,” said Bethel. “We have also asked the Getty Museum if they would consider doing some sort of scientific analysis on the images they have.”
    Bethel said that she hopes to bring the image up at a later auction—perhaps with an entire catalog devoted to its history. That would be a first for the Sotheby’s photo department, she said. In the meantime, interest in this piece of photo history will be mounting—and maybe the price for it, as well. In the weeks to come we’ll be paying close attention to this story.—David Schonauer

Comments

[J-E]

... the image could prove that photography was invented not in 1939.

1939?

[Dave]

Wedgewood...as in the family in England whose daughter married Charles Darwin? There's probably an interesting connection there worth exploring...

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