i am greatly interested in historic topographic and architectural photographs and the early photographers who did that sort of work. i have a nice library of monographs and histories, and have purchased a few nice albumen photos by people like carleton watkins, edouard baldus, antonio beato, pascal sebah, felix bonfils and others. over the past few years, by surfing on ebay and a variety of online museums and dealers, i have started assembling a sort of digital portfolio of all kinds of albumen and historic prints by saving the jpg's from the webpages. it makes a fascinating slideshow and is a great reference for my interests.

i was thinking that perhaps there are others out there that are harvesting interesting images from websites and building personal libraries of pictures which interest them for one reason or another. it might be fun to be able to share some of these rare images which have never been published in books, especially with a few folks who share a very specific area of interest.

perhaps we could start posting questions like, "does anyone have any scans of civil war photos by andrew russell?" or "i'm looking for weston portraits", etc - the range is of course unlimited. a 75dpi scan in jpg format is usually not more than 45k or so, and they would be easy to email or post somewhere where others could copy them. i can certainly do this with images from my own collection, if an of you like stuff like 19th century albumen architectural and topographic views of europe and the orient - the "grand tour" areas and sites.

so, with all that said, are any of you building your own personal database of historic photographs? does anyone have any scans of photographs made by hippolyte auguste collard -'photographe des pontes et chaussees', baldus, le gray, bonfils, zangaki, lekegian, sebah, or similar they might want to trade or share? actually, if you even know who collard was, i would be interested in talking to you...

cheers!

-- jnorman (jnorman34@attbi.com), February 25, 2002

Answers

Interesting. I am a seriuos collector of antique dog photography and have written a book on the subject. I collect the real objects, but the idea of swaping low res images for home computer fun sounds intriguing. I will watch the responses to your question. Feel free to contact me off site...

Scott

-- Scott Jones (scottsdesk@attbi.com), February 25, 2002.