Original negatives- underrated? Show yours

[mikejanesphotography]

Maybe someone knows the answer here, but with negatives from Charles Conlon, how did they end up on the market? I know from when John Rodgers bought the collection from The Sporting News and they were recently re-sold hundreds of them came up missing, are the ones out there the missing ones? If that's the case, was Rodgers legally allowed to sell them to begin with? Same with Brace/Burke, apparently Rodgers sold them off violating the agreement, so were those negatives on the market before Rodgers did that? He's being sued for selling them and missing payments, along with dozens of other things!

Just goes to show the damage one guy can do...

[horzverti]

Originally Posted by mikejanesphotography

Maybe someone knows the answer here, but with negatives from Charles Conlon, how did they end up on the market? I know from when John Rodgers bought the collection from The Sporting News and they were recently re-sold hundreds of them came up missing, are the ones out there the missing ones? If that's the case, was Rodgers legally allowed to sell them to begin with? Same with Brace/Burke, apparently Rodgers sold them off violating the agreement, so were those negatives on the market before Rodgers did that? He's being sued for selling them and missing payments, along with dozens of other things!

Just goes to show the damage one guy can do...

The Rogers' fraud story is a huge black eye on our hobby. I believe there was an ≈800 unit discrepancy between TSN's figure of 8300 Conlon negatives sold to Rogers in 2010 and the ≈7500 negs sold earlier this year as part of the liquidation of Rogers' assets. Rogers, via distributor(s), sold at least 75 individual 4 X 5 acetate negs around 2010 or 2011 if I remember correctly. I don't know if TSN's 8300 figure was a high estimate or if Rogers sold all 800. Rogers owned the Conlon negs, so I believe that he did have the legal right to sell them.

[Forever Young]

Millers

[thecatspajamas]

Originally Posted by mikejanesphotography

Maybe someone knows the answer here, but with negatives from Charles Conlon, how did they end up on the market? I know from when John Rodgers bought the collection from The Sporting News and they were recently re-sold hundreds of them came up missing, are the ones out there the missing ones? If that's the case, was Rodgers legally allowed to sell them to begin with? Same with Brace/Burke, apparently Rodgers sold them off violating the agreement, so were those negatives on the market before Rodgers did that? He's being sued for selling them and missing payments, along with dozens of other things!

Just goes to show the damage one guy can do...

With regard to the Burke/Brace archives, Rogers struck a deal with Mary Brace, George Brace's daughter, to purchase the archive for an up-front lump-sum payment (sort of a down-payment) plus periodic payments to follow. Per the deal, he had the ability to sell the original negatives before all of the payments had been made. I do not know if he was supposed to return a percentage of those sales to Mary as they happened, or what the specific terms of the repayment following sales were. He was also to be scanning the originals and returning an archive of scans to Mary that could be used to continue to produce prints. From what I understand, he either did not return scans to her, or the scans he did produce were sub-par, and after the initial lump-sum payment (and possibly one or two of the periodic payments?) he failed to make the periodic payments to follow up. There was a news article that quoted Rogers lawyer talking about unanticipated difficulties they had with copyright and marketing the images, and that they might have to unwind the deal. By the time he was missing payments though, the "key" images of HOFers were long gone, and the bulk of the archive had been sold, so there really was no way to unwind the deal and return the negatives. I'm sure Mary would have much preferred to get the archive back, but by the time Rogers was missing payments, it was much too late. That there was a deal that essentially allowed Rogers to sell off the collateral before having paid for it boggles my mind, but perhaps there are nuances to the deal that I am not aware of. Whatever the case, the last I heard, Mary had joined the line of creditors and business partners suing Rogers, and nothing usable (either negatives or scans) had been returned to her.

That said, Rogers was not the only one who released Burke/Brace negatives into the collecting community. There was a large grouping of negatives (several thousand, if memory serves) that proceeded from the estate of Jim Rowe that were sold through either Mastro or Legendary (it was either one of the last Mastro auctions or one of the first Legendary auctions, can't recall offhand which). I do not know if these were ever broken up and resold, or if they remained together in some other archive. It would be difficult to discern if they did hit the market now.

There are also anecdotal accounts of Brace himself having sold or bartered negatives over the years. (One story I heard had him trading negatives for help changing a tire on his vehicle.) So all of that is to say that there were some Burke/Brace negatives on the market prior to Rogers getting them, but clearly he did the most damage in terms of breaking up the archive and scattering it to the winds. That this was done without producing a comprehensive catalog of scans for later use and reference is, to me, the biggest tragedy of the whole story.

[mikejanesphotography]

horzverti & cats - thanks for those responses.

Thought had read he was not supposed to sell any of the negatives for one of the archives, probably misread something, but it would be interesting to know what the agreements allowed. This would be especially true in terms of the copyrights, since he violated the agreement, if he ever had them to begin with, etc. I did not know that some had been on the market from Brace/Burke before Rodgers took the archive, explains a lot really!

Conlon is mostly together still, Brace/Burke though, you're right, it's a shame they were not scanned properly and a catalog was made before being sold! Do not see a way it could ever be done either - unless those who own Burke/Brace prints/negs scan and fans create a central website to house them, kind of put them together backwards. Expensive and massive though.


Also see who outbid me on those auctions Forever_Young!!

[thecatspajamas]

Originally Posted by mikejanesphotography

Thought had read he was not supposed to sell any of the negatives for one of the archives

That may well have been the case with the Conlons. I know he had some sort of shared profit agreement with The Sporting News for the marketing of the Conlon images. That may have required him to keep the Conlon collection intact as well, but I just don't know.

Originally Posted by mikejanesphotography

Conlon is mostly together still, Brace/Burke though, you're right, it's a shame they were not scanned properly and a catalog was made before being sold! Do not see a way it could ever be done either - unless those who own Burke/Brace prints/negs scan and fans create a central website to house them, kind of put them together backwards. Expensive and massive though.

Even with fan/collector participation, such a project would never approach replicating the original archive. Even if one could contact every collector who has a portion of the archive, there are too many with the "1/1" attitude of wanting to be the only one who has a particular image that would not participate. The early negatives are also large enough that most desktop scanners cannot accommodate them, meaning the vast majority of collectors do not have a way of scanning the negatives, even if they are inclined to contribute to such a project.

[Forever Young]

Originally Posted by thecatspajamas

Even with fan/collector participation, such a project would never approach replicating the original archive. Even if one could contact every collector who has a portion of the archive, there are too many with the "1/1" attitude of wanting to be the only one who has a particular image that would not participate. The early negatives are also large enough that most desktop scanners cannot accommodate them, meaning the vast majority of collectors do not have a way of scanning the negatives, even if they are inclined to contribute to such a project.

Maybe we should try anyway. Even if 1/10 were scanned, it would be great. I mean.. I will contribute my 6!

[Keith_Loving]

Originally Posted by Forever Young

Maybe we should try anyway. Even if 1/10 were scanned, it would be great. I mean.. I will contribute my 6!

I bought three (3) original 5x7 George Burke negatives recently and I already have them scanned. At 2000 DPI resolution, the file size in PNG is 232MB and in JPG is 38.6 MB

I sent them off and had them professionally scanned and they turned out even better than I could have imagined. Cost was $105 for the company I picked online.

On a side note, there is a new owner in Illinois who picked up many many boxes (about half of the Burke negatives) from an auction, he was able to get them for around $45,000. I have made one attempt at contacting the company in search for a one particular player from the Cardinals, but I never got a response. I can link you to the article if anyone is wanting to read about this transaction. I had to "pay" for the article and so I probably will need to take a screen shot of it of you want to read it, else you will have to pay to read the article online.

[mikejanesphotography]

Originally Posted by Keith_Loving

I bought three (3) original 5x7 George Burke negatives recently and I already have them scanned. At 2000 DPI resolution, the file size in PNG is 232MB and in JPG is 38.6 MB

I sent them off and had them professionally scanned and they turned out even better than I could have imagined. Cost was $105 for the company I picked online.

On a side note, there is a new owner in Illinois who picked up many many boxes (about half of the Burke negatives) from an auction, he was able to get them for around $45,000. I have made one attempt at contacting the company in search for a one particular player from the Cardinals, but I never got a response. I can link you to the article if anyone is wanting to read about this transaction. I had to "pay" for the article and so I probably will need to take a screen shot of it of you want to read it, else you will have to pay to read the article online.

Definitely would like to see it! Talk about a community project, restore the collection to the best that it can be, be interesting to say the least. The fact he has that many is interesting, thought they were gone to the wind so to speak.

I'm surprised you paid that much to get them scanned, did they restore as well? I have a negative scanner and did it myself and then sent them off to a guy overseas who did them for $2-15/each. Did an absolutely spectacular job of restoring them. It would have cost about $85/each if done though a company in the U.S. that oddly uses the same labor overseas.

[mikejanesphotography]

Originally Posted by thecatspajamas

That may well have been the case with the Conlons. I know he had some sort of shared profit agreement with The Sporting News for the marketing of the Conlon images. That may have required him to keep the Conlon collection intact as well, but I just don't know.

Even with fan/collector participation, such a project would never approach replicating the original archive. Even if one could contact every collector who has a portion of the archive, there are too many with the "1/1" attitude of wanting to be the only one who has a particular image that would not participate. The early negatives are also large enough that most desktop scanners cannot accommodate them, meaning the vast majority of collectors do not have a way of scanning the negatives, even if they are inclined to contribute to such a project.

Conlon - could be, never did see much of a follow up on the story to know more.

Brace/Burke - definitely, that's what would make it extremely expensive. Plus you couldn't just rely on negatives but would have to scan prints as well because those negatives may be lost in private collections or just gone (or 1/1 attitude). Guess that's kind of what the LOC did with the Bain collection, they have if it was scanned from the original negative or a print since some of the negatives ended up in collections. Even with a large amount of them scanned/restored and on a site, not sure what could do with it...except list who owns the original negative, or the print that it came from, if for sale, etc. Mary Brace probably still owns the copyrights to them all is my guess.

[TCMA]

I'm currently working with an archive containing hundreds of original glass plate negatives from the 30's. You may have seen some of my posts about this but here's a sampling:

Typical neg from the archive. Leo Durocher, St. Louis Cardinals:


Professionally cleaned and restored image of Sam Leslie, NY Giants in our proposed postcard size:

[jefferyepayne]

Only have a few:



1916 Thorpe at bat.



1925 Grange during his first pro football game.



1924 Grange at Illinois



1928 Grange with kids

jeff

[MVSNYC]

Pretty awesome thread. What struck me, was that Al Simmons photo with his son...if his son is alive today, he's probably around 80!

In that Thorpe photo, looks like he tore the cover off the ball, man.