Fine Art for Men

Vintage prints are considered the original piece of art, as it is possible to arbitrarily obtain many copies from the same negative. This means that vintage prints are often signed by the photographer.Vintage prints are considered the original piece of art, as it is possible to arbitrarily obtain many copies from the same negative. This means that vintage prints are often signed by the photographer.

The history of early photography is littered with salvage stories - of one photographer rescuing and preserving the archive of another. Probably the greatest of these is the story of Berenice Abbott, a young American portrait photographer living in Paris during the 1920s, an ex-student, like Lee Miller, of Man Ray. In 1925 she became friendly with an old French street photographer, who was a neighbour of Ray's in Montparnasse, and finally she asked if she could take his portrait. He agreed. She took the pictures, printed them - one front view, one side view - and took them to show him the results. But in that short time, she discovered, he had died. His archive had been left to a friend, Andre Calmettes, who sold off 2,000 prints almost immediately. Abbott decided to buy the rest. In the autumn of 1928 she took receipt of 1,500 glass-plate negatives and around 8,000 prints, and the following year, when she returned to New York, she took the archive with her. Forty years later it was bought by the Museum of Modern Art and thus the work of Eugène Atget, one of the greatest of all photographers, was saved.