[Leica] A YARD SALE TALE - Part I (HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH DIGITAL)

["bdcolen" <bdcolen@earthlink.net>]

So last week my wife, who has an antique business, comes home from a
yard sale with an old photo album - I'm still not sure what compelled
her to purchase it for a few bucks, other than the fact that she figured
someone would purchase it from her for a few bucks more than she paid.
;-)

Anyway, my daughter - art school photo grad, employed as master b&w
printer - and I were looking through the album. The small, b&w prints
appeared to be from the '30s, based on the couple of shots with cars in
them, and mostly appeared to have been taken in and around Cape Cod.
There were a number of photos of crashing surf, and a surprising number
of the images were pretty well composed, and reasonably interesting
look....and then there were...

...the two images of a ballpeen hammer smashing a light bulb - frozen in
mid smash, and the image of something like milk, in a cake pan, with a
droplet hitting the surface. HOLY SHIT! We both exclaimed. Could it
be?...

Well, my daughter works for an outfit that does all the printing for the
Doc Edgerton estate - the man who owns the lab did all the printing for
Edgerton in the 60s and the prints you may associate with Edgerton are
associated with him. So yesterday my daughter was talking to someone at
the lab about what we had found. She described the hammer shot, and was
told that it sounds very much like a "lost" Doc Edgerton - an image of
which there are very few prints around. My daughter said, nah, these
prints REALLY suck - the negs were filthy, they're flat, no contrast,
etc. And the person at the lab said, "Edgerton was an awful printer, and
that's what the stuff HE printed looks like - anything decent of his"
was printed by someone else.

Soooooo....Do we have three very early, original Doc Edgerton's, picked
up for lose change at a yard sale? I don't know yet. For that matter, do
we have a home photo album of original Doc Edgerton photos and prints of
mundane home album sorts of photos? I don't know. But if you think about
when these appear to have been taken, and how old he would have been,
and the fact that there are a surprising number of photos of surf,
frozen in mid-crash.....hmmmmmm......

Stay tuned for Part II next week:

Alicia Shows The Album to Doc's Printer! :-)

B. D.

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