From the April 2026 issue of Apollo.
Photography arrived in the United States at the same moment as the railroads and the telegraph. On 30 September 1839, New York’s Morning Herald reported, ‘We saw, the other day, in Chilton’s in Broadway, a very curious specimen of the new mode, recently invented by Louis Daguerre in Paris, of taking on copper the exact resemblance of scenes and living objects, through the medium of the sun’s rays reflected in a camera obscura.’ The process by which this ‘daguerreotype’ image was produced – probably by an Englishman, D.W. Seager – had been announced in Paris barely nine months earlier. By December, François Fauvel Gouraud, agent for art restorers turned camera-makers Alphonse Giroux & Cie, was in town, showing images made by Louis Daguerre himself and demonstrating the technology.
The nation itself was only 63 years old, in the throes of rapid expansion and turbulent with different visions for its future. Photography became the medium through which the nation began to confront itself. Daguerreotypes, the cheaper, quicker tin-types, ambrotypes, platinum prints, silver albumen prints, silver gelatin prints, stereographs and cyanotypes were produced all over the country; subjects ranged from individual and family portraits to the spectacular landscapes of the Western states, the bloody battles of the Civil War, the brutalities of slavery and the displacement of Native Americans. And while the medium became a vital instrument of scientific enquiry, it increasingly shone as an art form.
Last year the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted the exhibition ‘The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910’, which featured more than 250 photographs drawn from the museum’s William L. Schaeffer Collection. Schaeffer, a photography dealer, amassed his collection over 45 years; it contains more than 700 American photographs and albums from 1839 to the 1910s. These include both early masters of the genre and works by hundreds of previously unknown practitioners, reflecting the enormous possibilities of the photography market for collectors – the sheer variety of subject matter, the different points of entry (aesthetic, historical or technical) for enthusiasts, and the range of price points.
Few collectors are so eclectic. Traditionally, collectors of American photography have focused on establishing a chronological representation of the historic peaks of the art form. This might include daguerreotype portraits by 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 survey photography of Carleton E. Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Timothy H. O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, as well as notable albums such as Edward S. Curtis’s documenting of The North American Indian (1907–30). As Darius Himes, head of Christie’s photography department, explains, ‘The auction world is mostly governed by the sale of known works by known names. We generally are not breaking new ground when it comes to identifying artists from the historical record.’
According to Emily Bierman, head of Sotheby’s photography department, this market took off in the mid 1990s, as collectors in America shifted focus from early European photography. She notes high points such as a remarkable half-plate daguerreotype portrait of Boston merchant Samuel Appleton (1853) by Southworth & Hawes, in superb condition, which sold for $409,000 against a $60,000–$90,000 estimate at Sotheby’s New York in 2008. The sitter’s status can greatly enhance the value of portraits: in 2017 a half-plate daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States, taken in 1843, fetched $360,500 against a $150,000–$250,000 estimate at Sotheby’s New York. A cased quarter-plate daguerreotype from 1846 of the formidable Dolley Madison, the first ever photograph of a First Lady, taken by John Plumbe Jr, achieved $456,000 in 2024, more than six times the high estimate of $70,000. Bierman says, ‘Having a known artist added to the value. But it was an iconic subject.’ More recently, a breathtaking view of Yosemite Falls in sunlight by Watkins sold within estimate for $180,000 in January last year, in Sotheby’s New York sale ‘Art of the Americas, Featuring the American West’.
For Bierman, the greatest challenge to the market is ‘lack of supply of great photographs, oversupply of bad photographs’. Himes concurs: ‘Masterpieces are what are in demand, whether by Watkins or Edward Curtis, or early Alfred Stieglitz. What has shifted from the 1980s is that there are no longer flea markets or forgotten bookstores with boxes of photographs sitting around. The internet changed all of that, so it’s a different kind of hunt now.’ Another source of change is generational: ‘The people who were buying in the 1980s and 1990s are in their eighties and nineties, so whole collections are either being donated to museums (and coming off the market) or being sold again.’ The Lynn and Yann Maillet Collection of more than 200 daguerreotypes, auctioned last summer at Christie’s New York, ‘was 95 per cent sold, with a huge number of new collectors participating’. Himes adds, ‘Two years ago, we sold privately a massive album of Watkins mammoth-plate photographs for mid seven figures.’
Institutional buying has slowed, which the New York dealer Charles Isaacs says is partly because of the excellent job museum curators have done over the last 30 years ‘building collections of historically important, aesthetically great images’, but also because ‘There is so much uncertainty in the museum world currently about whether there is any funding for acquisitions.’ He notes ‘some action’ in the private market, however, in the humbler area of anonymous daguerreotypes, cartes de visite, stereographs and tintypes.
Hans P. Kraus, another New York dealer, has also noticed a resurgence of interest in daguerreotypes from younger collectors and artists. There is still some market, he thinks, for great classic images and albums – such as an album of 25 mammoth-plate views of Yosemite by Watkins he sold three years ago, or the iconic mammoth-plate image of a lone pine tree in Yosemite taken by Charles Leander Weed in 1864, which Kraus will be taking to the AIPAD Photography Show in April. Kraus will also take a curiosity: a whole-plate tintype of a railroad telegraph car with three men sitting at a telegraph machine, ‘with a huge American flag behind them’. He notes strong interest in anonymous photographs well-composed and in good condition, dealing with subjects such as the American Gold Rush, along with images of or taken by African Americans.
Dealer Michael Lee confirms a lively interest in imagery once used to fight for the abolition of slavery. A print of ‘The Scourged Back’, the most famous of all Civil War-era portraits of enslaved people – attributed to McPherson & Oliver and taken in 1863 at a camp of Union soldiers along the Mississippi River, where the escaped slave known as Gordon had taken refuge – went for $75,000 at New York’s Swann Auction Galleries in 2023, against an estimate of $10,000–$15,000. Lee notes strong growth in lower-value historical images of slavery and plantations and cartes de visite of Sojourner Truth and other abolitionists. He also points out that in the Lynn and Yann Maillet Collection sale it was vivid, clear anonymous images of ordinary people – a whisky maker, an explorer, a tutor – that made many times their estimates. He suggests that there is an image-led market, but also ‘a difficult history market’ led by those determined that ‘we will not lose these things’.
From the April 2026 issue of Apollo.
