Let the Bloodbath begin.. Show your Henry Yee winnings

[thecatspajamas]

Originally Posted by Lordstan

Maybe he did a John Rogers. Negotiated a price for the physical slides in exchange for a combination of money and digitized files of all the pictures. This could explain the disclaimer in the listing about not including the right to use the slides for profit.

FWIW, all of the Burke negatives are/were from John Rogers at one time, as he is the one who negotiated a deal with Mary Brace to acquire the Burke/Brace archives. It appears that he also acquired the RIGHTS to the images, in addition to the physical negatives, as part of that deal.

I say this because someone recently contacted me about obtaining rights to print a Burke image (that I was selling a negative for) with a newspaper article he was working on. I went through the whole explanation of how I had the physical negative, but the rights to the image itself were not mine to sell, and sent him to the bracephoto.com website to contact Mary Brace about rights. Only to find out that the bracephoto site was no longer active. Luckily I had saved screenshots of a couple of the pages that happened to include the contact e-mail which I gave him. So he e-mails Mary, and she responds that he should get in touch with John Rogers as he was now the one "handling the collection." So he does, and works out an agreement for publishing of the image, and kindly let me know how the whole thing went since I was nice enough to point him down the right path to start with.

Rogers has offered several rounds of Burke negatives through Legendary's last few auctions, as well as blown out quite a few through a couple of different sellers on eBay (primarily "lexibell-racing" which is now "argenta-images02"), and though I thought a couple of the Gehrig images might have been among those, I checked my screen grabs and those offered by Yee were not among them (there was a similar one with a young boy seated beside Gehrig, but not the same boy). I haven't compared them against the ones offered through Legendary.

So all of that is to say that I don't know whether Henry acquired the Burke negatives he just sold from Rogers directly (either on consignment or direct purchase), from one of Rogers' re-sellers, or on consignment from someone who go them in one of these ways. To my knowledge though, Yee did not work out any deal with Mary Brace for the image rights or any kind of scan-in-return-for-the-physical-negatives deal.

I do hope beyond hope that John Rogers had the foresight to scan and digitally archive all of the Burke negatives before releasing them to the four winds. I would love to see something along the lines of the website he put together for the Conlon Collection done for the Burke/Brace Archive as well. If John reads this, or anyone has his ear, please please make sure that this irreplaceable comprehensive visual record of 60 years of baseball's history is preserved, intact, in some fashion, even if only digitally. Done right, it would be the one-stop-shop for high-quality images of not only every ball player to set foot on the field over the course of six decades, including every uniform variation they ever donned, but also countless umpires and other auxiliary personnel who never appeared on film anywhere else.