Rare Book Monthly
Book Catalogue Reviews - July - 2006 Issue
Original Photography in Books and Albums from William Reese
Ernest Bellocq's photo of a lady of the evening from New Orleans' famed Storyville.
Bellocq apparently never printed his photographs. He was content to view them on the glass plates on which they were captured. Nor did he have any seeming plan for them. They went to his only heir, a brother who was, of all things, a priest, when he died in 1949. Most made their way through second-hand shops before finally being discovered later by collectors. This particular photograph, circa 1912, was printed from the glass plate shortly after Bellocq's death. Whatever Bellocq's purpose, there is art in his work, and there is also perhaps the best preserved evidence of what was happening behind the doors of Storyville, where prostitution was legal until the federal government shut it down in 1917. His photographs were the inspiration for the 1978 Brooke Shields/Susan Sarandon film Pretty Baby. As for the lady in the photograph, she would be about 115 today, but her youth will ever be preserved in Bellocq's photograph. $30,000.
Item 6 is the Harvard University class album for 1859. It includes photographs of students, professors, buildings, and the rowing team. Many of those students would have their lives cut short in the upcoming Civil War. $6,000.
Item 7 is an album of 22 original photographs of the city of Puebla, Mexico, shortly after the siege by the French in 1863. The French would succeed in briefly installing the regime of the Emperor Maximilian, but he was overthrown and executed four years later. $60,000.
Item 8 is the second known copy of a collection of 1875 photographs of Montevideo, Uruguay, designed to entice foreign investment. $9,500.
Item 9 is Vischer's Pictorial of California Landscape, Trees, and Forest Scenes. Grand Features of California Scenery, Life, Traffic and Customs. Vischer mounted 163 photographs of his drawings of just about every type of scene in California in this 1870 album. It comes with the text volume of the same name and an 1872 supplement. $27,500.
Item 10 is the photo album compiled in 1874 of the Wheeler survey of the American Southwest. This survey ran from 1871-73, and this album, containing 50 photographic prints, was produced in just 50 copies. Most are in institutional collections or were broken apart long ago. The photographs were taken by Timothy O'Sullivan and William Bell, and include the Grand Canyon, Indian pueblos, and Canyon de Chelly. $225,000.
The William Reese Company may be contacted at www.reeseco.com or 203-789-8081.
