From the April 2026 issue of Apollo.
Photography came to the United States at the same time as railroads and the telegraph. On September 30, 1839, New York Morning Herald reported, ‘We saw, the other day, at Chilton’s Broadway, a very remarkable example of the new method, recently invented by Louis Daguerre of Paris, of taking copper to resemble figures and living things, through the rays of the sun appearing in a camera obscura.’ The method by which this ‘daguerreotype’ was produced – probably by an Englishman, DW Seager – had been published in Paris nine months earlier. In December, François Fauvel Gouraud, a representative of art restorers turned camera makers Alphonse Giroux & Cie, was in town, showing pictures made by Louis Daguerre himself and demonstrating technology.
The nation itself was only 63 years old, suffering from rapid growth and turmoil with different visions of its future. Photography became a method that society began to face. Daguerreotypes, cheap, fast brick types, ambrotypes, platinum prints, silver albums, silver gelatin prints, stereographs, and cyanotypes were produced nationwide; Subjects ranged from portraits of individuals and families to dramatic landscapes of the West, the bloody battles of the Civil War, the atrocities of slavery and the expulsion of Native Americans. And while media became an important tool for scientific research, it shined more and more as an art form.
Last year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted the exhibition ‘The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910’, with more than 250 photographs taken from the collection of the William L. Schaeffer museum. Schaeffer, a photo dealer, amassed his collection over 45 years; contains more than 700 American photographs and albums from 1839 to the 1910s. These include the first artists of this genre and works by hundreds of previously unknown artists, showing the wide range of photography market opportunities for collectors – different types of content, different entry points (aesthetic, historical or technical) for enthusiasts, and a wide range of prices.
Few collectors are very versatile. Traditionally, American photo collectors have focused on creating a chronological picture of the historical peaks of the art form. This would include the daguerreotype images of the Boston studio Southworth & Hawes, followed by the Civil War photography of Matthew B. Brady, Alexander Gardner, George N. Barnard and Andrew J. Russell and the Western research photography of Carleton E. Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Timothy H. O’Sullivan and William Henry Jacksons, as well as the notable documenting of the Edward S. Curtis Album. North American Indian (1907–30). As Darius Himes, head of Christie’s photography department, explains, ‘The auction world is largely dominated by the sale of well-known works by well-known names. We are generally not breaking new ground when it comes to distinguishing artists from the historical record.’
According to Emily Bierman, head of Sotheby’s photography department, this market began in the mid-1990s, when American collectors turned their attention away from European photography. He notes highlights such as a stunning half-plate daguerreotype of Boston merchant Samuel Appleton (1853) by Southworth & Hawes, in excellent condition, which sold for $409,000 against an estimate of $60,000–$90,000 at Sotheby’s New York in 2008. 2017 “half-plate daguerreotype” of John Quincy Adams, sixth president of United States, dated 1843, fetched $360,500 against an estimate of $150,000–$250,000 at Sotheby’s New York. An 1846 quarter-plate daguerreotype of the mysterious Dolley Madison, the first photograph of the First Lady, taken by John Plumbe Jr, fetched $456,000 in 2024, more than six times its high estimate of $70,000. Bierman says, ‘Having a well-known artist added value. But it was a special case.’ Recently, a stunning view of Yosemite Falls in sunlight by Watkins sold for $180,000 in January last year, at Sotheby’s New York sale of ‘Art of the Americas, Featuring the American West’.
For Bierman, the biggest challenge in the market is ‘a lack of great photos, an overabundance of bad photos’. Himes agrees: ‘The best works are sought after, whether by Watkins or Edward Curtis, or early Alfred Stieglitz. What has changed since the 1980s is that there are no more flea markets or forgotten bookstores with boxes of photos lying around. The internet has changed all that, so it’s a different way of hunting now.’ Another source of change is generational: ‘The people who bought in the 1980s and 1990s are in their eighties and nineties, so entire collections are given to museums (and off the market) or resold.’ Lynn and Yann Maillet’s collection of more than 200 daguerreotypes, sold last summer at Christie’s New York, is ’95 per cent sold, with a large number of new collectors participating’. Himes adds, ‘Two years ago, we privately sold a large album of Watkins mammoth-plate photographs for seven figures.’
The value of institutions has decreased, which New York businessman Charles Isaacs says is partly because of the wonderful work that museum curators have done in the last 30 years ‘to build historically important collections of pictures, but also because ‘There’s a lot of skepticism in the museum world right now about whether there’s money to buy.’ He notices some ‘action’ in the private market, however, in the simple area of anonymous daguerreotypes, business cardsstereographs and tintypes.
Hans P. Kraus, another New York dealer, also noticed a revival of interest in daguerreotypes from young collectors and artists. There is still a market, he thinks, for good old photos and albums — like the album of 25 mammoth-plate views of Yosemite by Watkins that he sold three years ago, or the mammoth-plate image of a single pine tree in Yosemite taken by Charles Leander Weed in 1864, which Kraus will take to the AIPAD Show in April. Kraus will have a curiosity: a railway telegraph car with three men sitting at the telegraph machine, ‘with a large American flag behind them’. He notices a strong interest in well-organized and well-framed anonymous photographs, dealing with subjects such as the American Gold Rush, as well as portraits of or taken by African Americans.
Auctioneer Michael Lee confirms the lively interest in paintings that were once used to fight for the abolition of slavery. ‘The Scourged Back’, one of the most famous Civil War-era portraits of enslaved people – produced by McPherson & Oliver and taken in 1863 at a Union camp along the Mississippi River, where an escaped slave known as Gordon had fled – fetched $75,000 at New York’s 2023 Swann Auction at Swann Galleries, $10,000–$15,000. Lee notes a strong growth in low-quality historical images of slavery and plantations and business cards of Sojourner Truth and other abolitionists. He also points out that the sale of the Lynn and Yann Maillet Collection was clear, vivid and anonymous portraits of ordinary people – a whiskey maker, a researcher, a guide – who made many times their guesses. He suggests that there is a market led by images, but also a hard market of history ‘led by those who are determined that ‘we will not lose these things’.
From the April 2026 issue of Apollo.
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