The Matriarch. New York, [1935, printed ca. 1960s]

Steichen made this celebrated photograph for a fundraising campaign for the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies during the first dark days of Nazi Germany.

$25,000

An album of 20 excellent views of Niagara Falls. Niagara Falls, New York, compiled in 1867

An outstanding album containing beautiful and unusual images including, as its final image, one of the most remarkable North American photographs of the period.

Please inquire

George Frederic Watts. Cameron, October 1865

This splendid portrait is inscribed and signed on the mount by Cameron: “G.F. Watts From Life not enlarged Julia Margaret Cameron.”

$22,000

Collection of Ten Photographs from Mooney’s Pioneering Investigations of the Ghost Dance and Other Native American Circle Dances. Various places, c. 1892-93

The rare and important collection documents the famous Ghost Dance and related circle dances soon after Wounded Knee. The collection testifies to the tragic demise of the Native American spiritual and cultural practices during the tumultuous Ghost Dance period. These photographs were taken by James Mooney (1861-1921), an anthropologist with the Bureau of American Ethnology. He left Washington in late 1890 to investigate the potentially incendiary Ghost Dance movement. Mooney’s rare portrait of Wovoka is one highlight of the collection. Mooney’s Ghost Dance photographs are of the greatest rarity in the market. We can trace no others having appeared for sale.

$20,000

Important Pair of Daguerreotypes: Black Caregiver with White Baby and the Child’s Parents. Talbot County, Maryland or Texas, c. 1853

This striking pair of daguerreotypes evokes the complex relationships between enslaved people and their enslavers in the American South, especially between white families and the trusted women who cared for their children.

the pair: $18,500

Autograph note signed to Robert Watt with original albumen print photograph. No place, July 16, 1874

Mark Twain the humorist. Samuel Clemens sent this delightful humorous note with the accompanying half- length standing portrait of the debonair author.

$18,000

Marian Seldes’s personal correspondence, comprising mainly letters and notes to Seldes, with some photographs and other objects inscribed to her. Various places, 1940s-1990s

“All I’ve done is live my life in the theater and loved it … If you can get an award for being happy, that’s what I’ve got.”

– Marian Seldes on receiving the 2010 Tony Lifetime Achievement Award

$18,000

Photo Album Operation Greenhouse. Hollywood, California: United States Air Force Lookout Mt. Laboratory, [1951]

This rare album documents Operation Greenhouse, the first series of tests in the nascent American thermonuclear weapons program. The four tests were performed in April and May 1951 at the Enewetak Atoll of the Marshall Islands. Following the Soviet Union’s successful test of an atomic bomb in August 1949, the United States made the controversial decision to proceed with the development of thermonuclear weapons. These fusion weapons (the “Super” or hydrogen bomb) would be orders of magnitude more destructive than the fission weapons used against Japan.

$17,500

Splendid album containing 50 watercolors, 70 photographs, and fine calligraphic selections of poems and prose. Mostly Possingworth and environs, 1879 - ca. 1905

This magnificent, imposing album was made by a prominent late-Victorian hostess, patron of the arts, and gifted amateur artist. Helen Rose Huth was the wife of the banker Louis Huth. The Huths were major art collectors, and Helen sat for both George Frederic Watts and James Abbott McNeill Whistler who painted the celebrated “Arrangement in Black, No. 2: Portrait of Mrs Louis Huth.”

$16,000

Great Salt Lake City, Wasatch Mts. Salt Lake City, 1869

This is a splendid print of this classic Jackson view of Salt Lake City.

$16,000