Corcoran, US

An aerial view of flood waters inundating farmland in the re-emerging Tulare Lake, in California’s Central Valley. Once the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi River, the lake disappeared when waters were diverted by agricultural interests to irrigate crops in the late 19th and early 20th century

Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

When Henry Yee arrived as a young boy in early 1970s New York City, he did what so many kids in the Big Apple do: He became a Yankees fan.

But his interests extended beyond the Bronx Bombers. Yee became enamored with old photos of New York, images of skyscrapers rising into a skyline built over a century, and life in America’s largest city as it evolved across the decades. He also loved vintage photos of iconic Yankees ballplayers — particularly Babe Ruth. By the 1980s, he was taking photography courses and began buying old photos of New York and of its ballplayers.

“I merged the two interests together,” Yee said. “Back then, there weren’t too many collectors of this stuff.”

And because it was a niche hobby, outside the refined world of fine art photography collecting and the older pastime of trading cards, it was a chaotic wild west of random pricing and no universal system of authentication — was that Ruth photo taken and developed while he was still playing, or developed off a duplicate negative many years later? Or was it a total fake?

“There always was a problem in our hobby,” Yee said. “There was no system for how we sell photos.”

By the 1990s, original vintage sports photography began coming into its own as a serious hobby, and what brought it wider attention was the famed September 1996 auction by Christie’s in New York of hundreds of images from “Baseball” magazine’s photographic archive that spanned 1908 through World War II and featured images of baseball’s greatest players of the era shot by the most famous baseball photographers, such as Charles M. Conlon.

“That’s when a lot of material was put on the market for the first time,” Yee said.

What took the hobby much closer to the far more structured universe of graded trading cards was Yee and a couple of collector friends, Marshall Fogel and Khyber Oser, assembling the 2005 book “A Portrait of Baseball Photography.”

But it wasn’t a coffee table book of vintage images. It systemized how to grade original sports photography.

And thanks to that system, which allows images to be “slabbed” in a plastic holder with condition and grading data like a trading card, the vintage photography hobby has become a genre of sports collectibles that produces eye-popping sales prices that can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In the book, Yee and the others created what’s known as “The Photo Type Classification System” and in 2007, PSA (one of the major card-grading companies) licensed the system to create an authentication and grading service for old photos. Yee was hired to run PSA’s photo grading and authentication service.

“To get to the next level, someone had to create a system to give it structure. With cards, you had that organization,” Yee said. “There was no third party, which gives it a boost and gave confidence to those not collecting those items to come in. Once it’s graded, it becomes a commodity that can be traded sight unseen.”

The system they developed grades photos as Type I through IV based on the negative and when it was developed from that negative. The best is a Type I photo, which means the image was developed from the original negative within two years of that image being shot, while a Type II photo is made from the original negative after two years from the negative’s creation.

Type III and Type IV photos are made from duplicate negatives, not the original, and are graded as either within two years of the duplicate negative’s creation or after two years. Those have much less value than Type I and II.

The system is now the foundation of original sports photography buying and selling.

“Took a few years to get momentum, and by 2012-13 it started picking up,” Yee said. “It was shocking to us that it was so widely accepted. You had a framework that allowed the hobby to grow.”

Unlike trading card collectors, original photography buyers expect some wear and tear or editorial marks — grease pencil lines for cropping, agency and filing stamps, notations, paper captions, etc. — on the physical images because the photos were used in practical ways and were not intended as collectibles. And if the marks came from a noted photographer, that could add further provenance and value to the image.

“People appreciate photos that were practically used and have the evidence of behind-the-scenes editorial work,” said Oser, Yee’s co-author and now the director of vintage memorabilia and photography at Goldin Auctions. “That’s not a liability, that’s not a detriment. … For now, at least, condition is secondary.”

Original sports photography has been growing in popularity on the shoulders of the wider collectibles surge that’s been underway for several years, particularly among trading cards that have seen some sell for as much as $12 million.

“Original photography has benefitted from the card boom,” said Robert Edward Auctions president Brian Dwyer.

Earlier this month, Robert Edwards Auctions sold a Type 1 Josh Gibson photo from the 1940s when he was with the Homestead Grays, an image used for his 1950-51 Toleteros rookie card, for $150,000. In the same auction, a circa 1913 original photo of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson of the Cleveland Naps, graded Type 1 and shot by Conlon, sold for $132,000 while a Type 1 1947 Jackie Robinson rookie photo — taken the day after he broke baseball’s racial color barrier as a Brooklyn Dodger — sold for $32,400, the auction house said.

This Type I photo of Jackie Robinson, taken one day after he broke MLB’s color barrier, sold for $32,400, Robert Edwards Auctions said. (Courtesy of Robert Edwards Auctions)

“We’re seeing the number of photographs come to market increase, but also the number of people bidding increase,” Dwyer said.

Like with cards, rarity drives interest and price, and photos have a more defined era of physical availability than cards. Photographers were limited by their film stock — a camera held only so much film — until digital photography started to become widespread in the 1990s and shooters could take literally endless numbers of photos.

“The rarity factor is gone,” said Rob Rosen, the vice president of sales and consignments at Heritage Auctions.

Hence, original sports images starting with the rise of baseball (and photography itself) around the time of the American Civil War through the end of the 1980s is the general collecting period.

What most often drives price are the celebrity of the player, the age and rarity of the photo under the classification system, and if the image has historical significance linked to a milestone event.

“The first million-dollar photo … turned out to be a 1951 Bowman card-used photo (of Mickey Mantle), I think in a private sale,” Oser said. “Six-figure photos are more and more common, and we will certainly be seeing more million-dollar photos.”

Who took the photo also can significantly goose value.

One such shooter was Conlon, who took an estimated 30,000 baseball photos until his retirement in 1942. His archive of more than 7,400 fragile glass plate and other negatives sold through Heritage Auctions in 2016 for $1.79 million.

Conlon, who mostly took portrait shots of players, is perhaps best known for an action photo of Detroit’s grim-faced Ty Cobb sliding into third base on July 23, 1910, at New York’s Hilltop Park — the Highlanders’ home stadium until 1912, a year before they became the Yankees — with infielder Jimmy Austin failing to tag him amid a small explosion of dirt around the bag.

An original image developed by Conlon off the negative he shot that day for the New York Evening Telegram sold for $390,000 via Robert Edwards Auctions in December 2020.

Famous photo of Ty Cobb sliding into third, taken by photographer Charles Conlon in July 1910, sells for $390,000 in @REAOnline sale. pic.twitter.com/41A55dPRUB

— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) December 7, 2020

Even outside the major auction houses, vintage original sports photos are priced at big numbers.

On eBay as of this writing, there’s a PSA-graded Type I 1923 photo of Lou Gehrig that’s possibly the earliest photo of him in a Yankees uniform, and it’s listed at $500,000 with 49 people labeled as watching the listing. Next after that is a listing for a 1919 Babe Ruth photo for $125,000.

Auctioneers said modern sports images taken from negatives sell for much less than the vintage stuff, but value can still be found from early images of top-tier athletes such as Michael Jordan, particularly of the photo used for his much-sought 1986 Fleer rookie card.

While loose, framed, or mounted vintage photos used to be the only way they were sold for years, the ability to get images authenticated and graded in plastic holders (known as slabs) streamlined the hobby, with PSA as the only major firm doing such work.

“Slabbing always helps everything,” Rosen said. “We’ve sold some (original photos) for half a million dollars.”

The hobby isn’t limited to enormously expensive cards. Collectors can buy lower-graded photos for much cheaper prices, even under $100, but famous players may still be pricey even at the lesser type levels.

“Collectors underappreciated Type II and III photos for many years, and now you see Type II and IIIs being affordable alternatives to important historical images,” Oser said. “The value is there now. We are selling Ruth and Gehrig Type IIIs in the thousands of dollars.”

And much like the trading card world’s scandals, original sports photography has experienced its share of fraud and swindlers.

For example, the baseball photo archive of Chicago’s George Brace, who died in 2002, was sold for $1.35 million in 2012 but the deal ended up in lawsuits over non-payment, and the buyer, vintage news and sports photos and memorabilia collector John Rogers, in 2017 pleaded guilty to running a fraudulent operation and was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $23 million in restitution.

“There’s a seedy underbelly to baseball photography,” Oser said. “All these industries had their wild west period before professional authentication became the sheriff in town.”

Authentication is intended to help offset deception as the hobby matures. PSA has invested in resources and staffing as sports photography collecting has continued to grow, Yee said, with more space devoted to his department and a dozen staffers working under him.

“We have grown double every year for the past five years, in submissions and revenue,” Yee said. He didn’t disclose financial specifics.

Babe Ruth photos, like this Type I from the 1910’s, are the star attraction. “He is the guy in our hobby, the king,” Henry Yee says. (Courtesy of Robert Edwards Auctions)

PSA is owned by Collectors Universe, which since its 1986 founding has created a number of sports and non-sports collectibles third-party authentication and grading services. Billionaire New York Mets owner Steve Cohen led an investment group’s purchase of Collectors Universe for $700 million in early 2021 and then bought Goldin Auctions as a standalone business several months later for an undisclosed sum.

That means PSA and one of the major auction houses are linked, which can raise eyebrows, but the photo grading system has been widely accepted across the industry. Trust is critical.

The authentication process is rooted in experience, Yee said, and practical research and technical investigation with powerful microscopes and other technology. In addition to basic eye tests, PSA has a library of thousands of photo paper samples and hundreds of photo agency stamps against which researchers can index an image. Yee calls it a fossil record and noted, “the paper doesn’t lie.”

“You see enough of something, you know right away. There are signs to look for. It comes from experience,” Yee said. “We can identify a photo right away. Some of it, we can’t. We’re still learning.”

Baseball remains the most popular sport among submissions and collectors, Yee said, but there’s been an uptick in other sports, including football, basketball, hockey and soccer, in recent years.

“The most expensive photographs are going to be baseball,” Yee said. “It’s always been that way. It’s always vintage baseball.”

The most money for single vintage images mirrors what’s the big driver in baseball cards: rookies.

“(That) is where the market has matured,” Yee said. “That gap has widened so much, with the rookie images selling for 10, 20 times as much (as later photos of players). People have started to realize that the early images are the hardest to find.”

What’s the so-called white whale of old baseball photos?

“The holy grail image is probably the Honus Wagner image,” Yee said. “It probably would blow past $5 million.” The auctioneers and others agreed.

Boston photographer Carl Horner shot Wagner in a studio around 1902 and the portrait was later used for the famed T206 Wagner “tobacco” card from 1909 that has been one of the most famous and expensive rare cards of all time. A few prints of the Wagner photo have sold for thousands of dollars in varying conditions, and the original image is said to be rarer than the trading card (a Wagner T206 sold in 2021 for $6.6 million).

Babe Ruth remains the most popular player among vintage photo collectors, Yee said, and in February a 1915 image of The Babe sold for $468,000 via Robert Edwards Auctions.

“He is the guy in our hobby, the king,” Yee said.

What vintage sports photography is missing that the trading card industry relies upon, particularly for the most rare and expensive items, is population reports. Those are lists of graded things and their sales prices — easy to do with cards because of known print runs and other data from manufacturers and collectors. But with photos, it’s usually impossible to know how many prints may have been made off a glass plate negative.

While PSA is working on some yet-to-be-disclosed efforts in that vein, true pop reports may be impossible, Yee said.

“The big challenge is cataloging it,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s logically possible and economically feasible.”

And the future of vintage sports photography collecting?

It’s obviously in the best interest of PSA and auction houses to be publicly optimistic, but it’s true that the overall collectibles boom — estimated to hit $35 billion this year — has continued and is expected to for some time. While any collectibles genre is subject to market forces and the whims of the public (hello and goodbye, sports NFTs) high-end commodities such as fine art, wine, cars, stamps, etc., have traditionally retained their value in the face of inflation and recessions. There are only so many Conlon and Brace Type I images left.

“The best of the best stuff will always continue to go up. It’s a finite amount of stuff,” Yee said.

GO DEEPER

State of the sports card boom: After sky-high surge, is market still healthy?

(Top photo: Charles M. Conlon / Sporting News via Getty Images Archive via Getty Images)

“Not all realisms: Photography, Africa, and the Long 1960s,” on view at the Smart Museum of Art, examines the mobilization of photography amid the shifting cultural and political dynamics that coincided with the African independence movements of the 1960s. The show surveys the dissemination of images over an array of print media, featuring the work of photographers Ernest Cole, James Barnor, Marc Riboud, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paul Strand, and many others. The Reader connected with curator and art historian Leslie M. Wilson, now the associate director of academic engagement and research at The Art Institute of Chicago, to talk about the research that shaped the exhibition and photography’s narrativizing role in material culture.

Alexandra Drexelius: Can you discuss the title of the exhibition, “not all realisms”? The lack of capitalization suggests an ambivalence towards authority or a troubling of universal statements. What does “realism” mean to you? 

Leslie M. Wilson: “Not all realisms” is a phrase taken from the last paragraph of the American photographer and photo theorist Allan Sekula’s 1986 essay “The Body and the Archive.” That essay focuses on how photographs have been used as a means to represent, to study, and surveil different types of people. At its heart is the tension between a medium that can be used all at once to make the portrait of a loved one and a mug shot, between what he frames as the “honorific” and “repressive” functions of the photograph. 

While that essay largely focuses on North American and European examples, at the very end, Sekula turns his attention to the work of the South African photographer Ernest Cole, whose book House of Bondage: A South African Black Man Exposes in His Own Pictures and Words the Bitter Life of His Homeland Today, published in 1967, was a powerful indictment of South Africa’s brutal system of racial segregation known as apartheid. Reflecting on the impact of Cole’s work, Sekula wrote, “Not all realisms necessarily play into the hands of the police . . . .” Writing this in the essay’s last paragraph, Sekula suggests that even though photographs can be used in repressive ways, they may still provide “testimony” about lived experiences that support meaningful challenges to unjust systems. This exhibition is interested in that potential.

As for the lack of capitalization, that actually reflects that in turning over the phrase from Sekula, “not all realisms,” I started to read it anachronistically through what we might call “hashtag logic,” as in #notallrealisms. And by that I mean a thought process that might sound something like: “I know realisms can be problematic and that I shouldn’t trust photographs and the ways that people and systems use them, but not all realisms are bad.” Or, “I know some really great realisms.” Against a lot of the distrust that people—that we—express about photographs on a daily basis, we make exceptions for the photographs we believe in or want to believe in. I wanted to hold space for the hope that the makers of photographs have for the medium’s capacity to represent aspects of lived experience. I wanted to make space for the hopes and the risks of making photographs and making claims to and about photographs. And I think we can really see that through the dynamic practices and the very high stakes of photography amidst the major political and social shifts in Africa in and around the 1960s.

The exhibition’s geographic scope includes the postcolonial context of West African nations Ghana (formerly Gold Coast) and Mali, which had both gained independence by the start of the 1960s. You also look at South Africa—reconstituting itself as a Republic in 1961, this so-called independence advanced the National Party’s discriminatory agenda and the ongoing disenfranchisement of Black South Africans. This juxtaposition offers a heterogenous view of Africa during this period—one articulated by the shifting map of independent African nations on the 1964 cover of the magazine Bingo, featured at the beginning of the exhibition. Could you talk about the role of place and what led you to focus on these nations?

I started with the Smart Museum of Art’s collection and built from there. When I began my two-year curatorial fellowship at the museum in 2019, I noted that only four photographs in the Smart Museum’s collection were made by African photographers: three photographs by the South African photographer Ernest Cole and one photograph by the Malian photographer Malick Sidibé. And all four photographs were made in the 1960s. And so I thought about what I could build with that work as a starting point. 

In thinking about that work, I reflected on the overlap in time frame but the radically different histories of these places. Yet, despite those differences and their geographic distance, through the circulation of images, through the circulation of publications, there were overlaps and connections and themes in conversation. I began to think that focusing on Ghana as well could further complicate and complement those explorations. From there, necessarily, the exhibition reaches beyond those three countries in following the flows of visual culture, of populations, of ideas.

In March 2020—before rushing back to the states and into pandemic-related lockdown—I was on a research trip to Johannesburg where I spent time with Ernest Cole’s papers in the Historical Papers Research Archive at Wits University. Cole’s exhaustive research in support of House of Bondage is evident in his extensive notes and his collection of booklets, magazines, newspapers, and more. Cole annotated many of these texts refuting the official accounts of the apartheid state. When the pandemic started, I wasn’t sure of the fate of the exhibition and whether I could reach out to collections beyond Chicago for loans, so I turned my attention even more emphatically to Chicago-area collections to serve as an engine for developing my thinking about the exhibition. With Cole’s papers still very much on my mind, I really dug into libraries and archives—especially the Herskovits Library at Northwestern and Regenstein Library at UChicago—as I focused on the material through which photography circulated most broadly in the 1960s before art museums and galleries in many parts of the world, including South Africa, Ghana, and Mali, began taking photography seriously as art. Books, magazines, newspapers, posters, and booklets were especially important.

Time also plays an important role in the exhibition. The long 1960s suggests an expansive temporal framework that allows for bleed. Can you discuss what the long 1960s means to you and the narratives it opened up for you?

I was living in South Africa back in 2015-2016, and during that time, a major period of student-led protests took place, motivated most directly by an announced plan to raise fees for university education—but more broadly by the colonial legacies and profound inequalities enduring in South Africa. There was a noticeable uptick of interest in the Black Consciousness Movement that emerged in South Africa in the 1960s, and I was really struck by the ways that it felt like the 60s were back—not only ideologically, but even in fashion, in style. I found myself thinking a lot about what students who hadn’t lived through that period of time and who were born after the official end of apartheid in 1994 were calling forth. And then I was thinking about how different that 60s was across southern Africa—where many countries were still mired in anti-colonial and anti-racist struggle—from what is so often thought about when the 60s are referred to in Africa, which is a shorthand for liberation and independence. Recent books like James Meyer’s The Art of Return: The Sixties and Contemporary Culture (2019) encouraged me to go even further in this direction. And then, there are my own imaginings about the 60s, a time that I didn’t personally experience but which has felt so culturally and politically alive in my life. That sense of presence has been fostered especially through the photographs and stories that my parents share, having immigrated to the United States from Jamaica in that decade, emphatically embracing their lives in Brooklyn, New York, while remaining closely connected to their West Indian community and roots. And so I’m thinking about Africa and thinking about diaspora and the lead up to and far-reaching legacies of the 60s.

I am also interested in photography’s relationship to time. The exhibition considers the material life of a photograph. Can you talk about moments in the exhibition where a photo’s meaning or impact changes through its transformation or distribution?

Yes, the ways in which photographs are reproduced and the ways in which they mutate and are subjected to other reimaginings and uses than those of their makers is crucial to the exhibition. This can be seen with some of Ernest Cole’s photographs from House of Bondage.

Cole was very committed to the book as a form for telling a powerful story about Black life under apartheid and the layout of the book and the control he could exercise over the relationship between image and text was very important to him. But as the struggle against apartheid continued into the decades that followed, many activists pulled images from the book to use in posters, pamphlets, and magazines. In the different uses of Cole’s photograph of young men behind bars, the contrast in the photograph is significantly heightened, it’s cropped, it’s given a sepia treatment, it’s adapted into a drawing. It is reimagined and remade over and over again as an icon of struggle. Reportedly, the use of Cole’s work without attribution or permission frustrated Cole, but it also speaks to the ways that a photograph can take on a life of its own. With examples of the use of Cole’s photograph in this way in the section of the exhibition titled “Again & Again,” I wanted to think about the photograph as a kind of zombie—it is alive in the present but shaped by a moment that has passed. 

Unlike other media, a photograph retains its medium-specificity when reproduced in other print media—a black-and-white image remains a black-and-white image; however, “not all realisms” exhibits photographic sources transformed in the paintings and collages of Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Romare Bearden, and Sam Nhlengethwa. How did you select these artists?

The works by these artists are in a close conversation with photography, using photographs as part of their material form in collage—in the work of Bearden and Nhlengethwa—and as transfers in the work of Crosby. But I’m especially excited about the ways that these artists play with time through their use of photography. Crosby adapts the subjects of Sidibé’s photographs, such as the dancers at the center of his renowned photograph Nuit de Noël (Happy Club), and paints them as larger-than-life figures. Although working in very different modes, these artists draw from the everyday in ways that help viewers see it better, to understand something more about life—life and death, memory and memorialization. 

The exhibition groupings indicate diligent, curious research. Could you share a favorite moment?

I spent a lot of time going through folders in the vertical files collection at Northwestern’s Herskovits Library. And the librarians there—Esmeralda Kale, Crystal Martin, and Gene Kannenberg in particular—know so well that I came across materials that prompted me to audibly gasp, which, you know, is not ideal in a library when you’re supposed to be quiet!

One major moment for me was coming across an issue of the newsletter Dissent, which was produced by the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) and South African National Students Press Association (SANSPA). That publication sought to “provide some analysis of the South African situation and encourage students to a struggle that requires courage, discipline and tenacity.” In a 1972 issue, an uncredited photograph by Ernest Cole appears in an article tracing the history of the disenfranchisement of  Black South Africans—an article that importantly takes the longer view of its roots in British imperialism and the wider European colonial project and not solely the product of Afrikaner nationalism. Despite its global readership and far-reaching impact, House of Bondage was banned in South Africa, and many there did not engage robustly with the project until after apartheid’s official end in 1994. However, this issue of Dissent, published just six years after the release of Cole’s book, demonstrates that Cole’s images were, in fact, circulating in South Africa following its release, albeit without attribution. Two of Cole’s photographs appear as illustrations in the same issue of Dissent in the article “Poverty, Apartheid and Economic Growth,” featuring the divisive signage of apartheid. Although used as mere illustrations and appearing without captions or analysis, these images signal wider visibility for Cole’s images—if not his book as a whole, in South Africa during the era following the book’s publication. And it speaks to the ways that Cole’s photographs circulated through their separation from the banned book.

Another key moment was when I came across an accordion booklet made in 1955 that outlines the Volta Dam River Project. The planning for that project was underway during colonial rule, before the Gold Coast officially became Ghana, and it was a project influentially promoted by then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. The booklet targeted audiences with a range of literacy levels—featuring text written in English and Ewe. It brings photographs, drawings, and text together to tell a story about this major industrial project, one that would displace many people in its efforts to accelerate aluminum production, thereby diversifying the country’s market beyond cocoa as its primary export. That booklet shows the dynamic ways that the government sought to reach audiences with its message, joining with a traveling film program shown in a mobile tent among other outreach efforts.

“not all realisms: Photography, Africa, and the Long 1960s”
Through 6/4: Tue-Wed, Fri-Sun 10 AM-5 PM, Thu 10 AM-8 PM, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, 5550 S. Greenwood, smartmuseum.uchicago.edu, free