Photographs

I've just come off the telephone from talking with a friend of mine who arrived back from Amsterdam where he had been to the opening of a photographic exhibition – he had luckily booked to go there and back on Eurostar and so avoided the disappointment of travelling, or  not, by plane. The exhibition of rock and pop photography from the 1960s is by a well known Danish photographer – Bent Rej.

As it says on the gallery's web site. . . Millions of words have been written about the sixties – the groups, the singers and the scene - but nothing captures the magic quite like brilliant photography. It was a time when music was not burdened with the labels that have since become commonplace. Pop music was…well it was pop music. Music marketing hadn’t been invented and while image was everything it wasn’t manipulated and managed like it is today. Music was either in the Pop, Jazz or Classical sections of record shops and Pop was everything from The Mothers of Invention and Jimi Hendrix to Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, and Tich.

These kind of limited edition prints may or may not increase in value over the next 20, 30, 50 or 100 years but they will be a beautiful addition to anyone's home. You can read more about Bent's photography that is on display in both Rotterdam and Amsterdam HERE

I have to say that I have not enjoyed the snow this winter. With my broken ankle it has meant that I've been very nervous when walking on icy surfaces. Even so I could not help but be captivated by some photographs that are on sale at the American antiques show in New York. They are the first photographs that were ever taken of snowflakes and the images were captured by Wilson A Bentley, an American farmer.

Bentley took his first successful photomicrograph of a snow crystal in 1885 at the age of 19 and went on to capture more than 5,000 images. There are ten on sale and they are being offered by Carl Hammer, whose Chicago art gallery is showing 20 other Bentley photographs. By rigging upa microscope with a bellows camera, Bentley was able to capture the exquisite delicacy of a snowflake which were shown in more than 2,500 images in his 1931 book, 'Snow Crystals.' As he said at the time "Every crystal was a masterpiece of design, and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost." Tragically just weeks after his book was published Bentley died after walking through a blizzard and later catching pneumonia.

The images are on sale for $4,800 (£2,950) at the American Antiques Show which ends tomorrow

The value of old photographs continues to rise and particularly if they are by one of the acknowledged 'old masters' of the genre. Francis Frith is one of them and Dominic Winter Book Auctions at South Cerney in Gloucestershire have some intriguing lots at their sale on 17 June, including this.

Egypt and Palestine Photographed and Described by Francis Frith, pub. James S. Virtue, [1858/59]. There are 58 (of 76) mounted prints with printed captions and facing letterpress, images 16 x 23 cm. The work was originally published in twenty-five monthly parts and many of the prints are dated 1857. The volume here offered is therefore missing eighteen of the photographs and an ownership signature of Florence Mary King, dated 1860, appears on the front free endpaper. It is expected to reach £2,500 to £3,000

On last night’s Antiques Roadshow, here in the UK, it featured a piece with me talking to a lady about a photograph that her husband had bought that was amongst a mixed box of odds and ends at an auction. When he got the box home he found, on closer inspection, that the old school photo included a very young Winston Churchill, which means it was worth over £100; a lot more than he paid for the whole box.

This morning I read this in an American newspaper, online. “Bill Epping combed through a box of old pictures marked "Instant Relatives" at a booth at the Urbana Antique Show and Flea Market on Sunday, 8 February. In an instant, there it was — a century-old, sepia-tinged photograph of one of Epping's relatives, Anna Mary Fitzmaurice-Witt. Fitzmaurice-Witt is Epping's great-aunt, one of his grandfather's 10 siblings. He believes she was born in the 1860s. "In 35 years of going to flea markets, I found my relative," he said.

It just goes to prove it’s worth looking through those boxes of old photographs; you never know who you might recognize.