A year of records, debuts and rediscovered works. As we reflect on 2018, we look back at an excellent year of auctions. In April we held our highest-grossing African-American Fine Art…
Daile Kaplan, Swann Vice President and Director of Photographs & Photobooks, contributed the following post in response to recent questions about Vernacular Photography: Within the past few days, since…
The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus is currently on tour with its latest spectacle, Circus XTREME, and a collection of photographs coming up for auction at Swann Galleries…
Swann’s second sale devoted to Vernacular Photography showed the strength of this growing segment of the photo market, with strong results for esoteric material. The top vernacular lot was…
We are delighted to offer a suffragist archive of rare and important photographs documenting “The Liberty Bell Tour, Votes for Women.” The march was organized by Louise Hall and her life-partner Ethel…
As Swann Director of Photographs & Photobooks Daile Kaplan jets off to France for Les Rencontres d’Arles 2014, those of us left stateside stifle our jealousy and devour all of the…
Last week Swann Galleries held an auction devoted to Vernacular Photography, which was the first sale of its kind. Two items led the auction–bringing $22,500 each–and they could not…
Celebrated photography collector and author–and Swann friend–Bill Hunt has written a wonderful review of the Morgan Library’s A Collective Invention: Photographs at Play show–the first mounted by their newly appointed Curator…
New discoveries are often made during our auction previews. Sometimes a guest will identify a place depicted in a work of art, or recognize a name in an inscription. One…
Back in December 2013, Swann auctioned an album of 27 spiritualist photographs from seances at Dr. Thomas Glendenning Hamilton’s Psychic Room in Winnipeg, Canada in the early 1920s for $93,750–in fact,…
Among the highlights of our April 17 auction of Vernacular Photography is a small archive of photographs and ephemera relating to transvestism and gay rights in New York City from…
There are many marvelous aspects of vernacular imagery but one, in particular, is essential: its chameleon-like identity. Lot 56 is a group of 19 photographs, most from an album formerly in…
Lot 44: an album of 200 cyanotype snapshots mostly from Eastern Massachusetts, 1899 The cyanotype or blueprint process has a poetic quality that embodies a painterly aesthetic and is defined…
As we approach the first ever auction devoted to Vernacular Photography, Daile Kaplan, director of Photographs and Photobooks offers this explanation of a growing field of collecting. Vernacular imagery…
Before the system of identifying individuals by fingerprint was developed, the authorities relied on the distinct, intricate hollows and folds of a person’s ear in order to positively link…
