Brown Brothers’ photo collection up for sale
Print Edition
Photographers from Brown Brothers hauled their cameras from Ellis Island to Broadway to Yankee Stadium to snap pictures of street urchins and socialites, hard hats and mobsters, athletes and entertainers, capturing nearly every aspect of New York City life in the first six decades of the 20th century.
Now, the more than 1 million photographs and negatives the company compiled are up for sale.
While the collection includes tens of thousands of images of the Big Apple, the bulk of the photographs capture “every conceivable historical personality and event and place” across the United States and beyond from the turn of the previous century through the 1950s, said Eric Caren, a prominent collector who has been contracted to sell the images.
“It was like I walked into a time capsule,” said Caren, adding that some of the photos date to the 1880s as the brothers acquired other photo companies’ stock.
While some photography collections held by institutions number in the millions, few, if any, in private hands can approach the Brown Brothers’ in terms of quality and scope, Caren said.
Images of the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911 that killed 146 garment workers and the sinking of the Titanic the following year are part of the collection. Celebrities and other headliners of the day, from Mark Twain and the Wright Brothers to Teddy Roosevelt and Babe Ruth, are also well represented.
Stored in more than 7,000 boxes, most of the prints have information written on the back in pencil, providing vital information on their date and subject.
The sale price starts at US$5 million, and Caren said he has already had interest from Columbia and Yale universities, California’s Huntington Library and the New York Public Library.
The massive collection’s ultimate sale price is hard to determine. In 2012, a collection of 20,000 daguerreotypes and early photographic equipment sold for US$15 million to a Toronto museum.
Raymond Collins, a managing partner at Sterling, Pennsylvania-based Brown Brothers, said about 30 percent of the images were taken in New York City.
The Brown Brothers provided pictures to New York newspapers at a time when the technology for publishing photos in daily publications was still new.
“Their credit pops up everywhere, from National Geographic to the Times,” said Michael Lorenzini, photography curator at New York City’s Municipal Archives.
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