As I approached it, I saw writing on the side in black felt pen: Mother’s Picture Collection. I glanced inside and saw that it was chock full of photos of an African American family. Now, I was doubly interested and knew that other auction-goers would be, too. Photos of African Americans sell relatively well at auction, because many people see them as highly valued Black Americana.

A photo that nurse Lessie inscribed to her mother.

I cursorily flipped through the photos, and saw single and attached Kodak prints – indicating that these had some years on them – studio portraits, and some later shots of the family of a woman named Lessie who had lived in Los Angeles. There were baby photos, soldier photos, boyfriend photos, a night at the club photo and photos shot at a home wedding.

Then I came upon some that other auction-buyers would surely want: a studio portrait of a young Lessie (short for Leslie) in her nurse’s uniform and addressed to “the sweetest mother ever born – whom I love with all my (she had drawn a heart here). Lessie.” There were also about 20 photos of a group of nurses in uniform.

The photos appeared to have been taken while these women were in nursing school. The photos stood out from the rest because they showed African American women in a career role. And that role was not as a domestic, the employment of necessity for too many black women around that time.

The photos of the nurses look as if they were taken on a campus.

Most of the photos were black and white,  and two were in color. One of those was dated Apr. 19, 1949, on the back. The box contained Lessie’s report card from Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles from 1945 to June 1949, so she was not likely in any of the photos. These could have belonged to a relative.

Lessie’s report cards showed that she was a B-C student who was outstanding in work habits, responsibility and cooperation.

I found an ID card of Lessie’s for an elementary school in Los Angeles where she was a school nurse.

I’m always a little saddened to see these old photos on the auction table, and always wonder why family members throw them away. Were there too many of them and they kept the best ones and tossed the rest? What can you do with a family member’s old report cards and photos? (Old report cards weren’t selling well on eBay; some photos were doing better.)

The same group of nurses from Lessie's box of photos.

In choosing nursing, Lessie was following a tradition of African American nurses that began in the 1800s although they were not formally trained as such. The most famous of them was Sojourner Truth who is better known as a former slave who became a well-known abolitionist and lecturer, speaking out vehemently against slavery. In 1865, she tended black soldiers at Freedman’s Hospital in Washington.

Also during the Civil War, Susan King Taylor nursed black soldiers from the 33d United States Colored Troops, and taught them to read and write. She wrote a memoir of her life, including her time with those soldiers, one of whom was her husband. She was also a laundress in their camp at Beaufort, SC, where she met Clara Barton – who would later found the American Red Cross – nursing soldiers in a hospital.

Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first African American registered nurse. She eschewed domestic work and decided that she wanted to be a nurse. She attended nursing school in the late 1870s, and after completing the training served as a private nurse for 30 years.

The first program to train African American nurses was started at Spelman Seminary (now Spelman College) in 1886, and the first hospital school of nursing came five years later at Provident Hospital in Chicago by African American surgeon Daniel Hale Williams. 

Two nurses stand in front of what looked like a 1940s automobile.

At auction, I almost didn’t get Lessie’s photos. I had stepped away from the box-lot room because the box was far back in the room and I assumed that I could come back before the auctioneer got to it. To my dismay, the box was gone when I returned. Later, though, I saw that it had been moved and forgotten.

I asked an auction assistant to offer the photos for bids, and as expected, another bidder wanted them to. I got them for $7 – although I only wanted to pay a buck.

Related posts:

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One was a photo of a woman with dolls that didn’t sell and the other, a woman with a saxophone, which sold for $500. I’m certain that I closely examined the woman with the saxophone, because it’s one of my most favorite instruments. But since the photo wasn’t signed James Van Der Zee or Cornelius Battey, I’m sure I just moved on.

Practicing on a voting machine, circa 1944-1945. Photo by Charles "Teenie" Harris.

His name wasn’t as recognizable to me as the locally familiar John W. Mosley of Philadelphia or Addison Scurlock and sons of Washington, DC, all of whom focused their cameras on African Americans at a time when most images of us were heartless and damaging.

So, how did Charles “Teenie” Harris get by me without a whimper?

I wasn’t sure, but he certainly won’t anymore. The Carnegie Museum of Art has mounted an exhibition “Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story” of about 1,000 of his photographs. It opened on Oct. 29, 2011, and will be around until April 7, 2012, when it hits the road for Chicago; Birmingham, AL, and Atlanta. The exhibit includes slideshows and an accompanying jazz soundtrack.

A friend told me about the exhibit, and I found the Carnegie website with his works. His photos are amazing. Some of them reminded me of the many family photos of Americans of all types that end up on the auction tables - some loose, others glued inside photo albums, all tossed by relatives who thought little of their value.

Harris and his contemporaries were more expansive with their picture-taking than the rest of us. Working for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the country’s oldest black newspapers, he photographed a large and diverse group of people who saw their faces on the pages of the newpaper. The museum purchased 80,000 negatives from his estate in 2001.

Like Mosley and Scurlock, Harris captured a piece of American life that the mainstream ignored. They all showed that black people lived and loved, shopped and partied, went to church and school, got married and had families, and worked and died.

The Homestead Grays playing at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, circa 1950. Photo by Charles "Teenie" Harris.

He also shot photos of Pittsburgh-area Negro Leagues baseball teams, including the Homestead Grays, along with such celebrities and famous people as Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Nat King Cole, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy.

According to a timeline on the Carnegie website, Harris was offered a job with the Courier in 1936 but turned it down because the pay was too low. A year later, he opened a photography studio, and his first credited photo ran in the newspaper. For the next 40 years, he worked out of his studio as well as for the Courier. He died in 1998.

I’m sure there were plenty of other African American photographers like Harris, Mosley and Scurlock. Tell me about the ones in your city.

Duke Ellington signing autographs, circa 1944. Photo by Charles "Teenie" Harris.

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The shiny teak wood and brass seemed to sparkle under the glare of overhead lights in a case near the front. The cameras were monstrously big (you wonder how anyone was ever able to carry them around and then hoist them on a tripod). As I rounded the corner, I was equally dazzled by glass showcases stacked with shelves of black cameras, some with extended red bellows.

These early plate cameras were an awesome part of the Edward K. Kaprelian Collection.

The cameras spanned the history of picture-taking not only in this country but in France, Germany, Japan and Great Britain from the 1880s to the mid-20th century. Some had names that were strangers to me – Sanderson, Gundlach, Ernemann, Pathe, Peckham Wray, Rectaflex – and others were old acquaintances – Kodak, Leica, Ansco, Voigtlander, Graflex.

More than 350 cameras were being sold from the estate of Edward K. Kaprelian, a collector of still and movie cameras, lenses, projectors, books, manuals and just about anything else related to the subject. Kaprelian died in 1997, and his son was liquidating some of his collection, which was expansive after more than 50 years of accumulations.

This was the auction house’s first camera sale, said owner Jeffrey Fuller, whose forte is fine arts, which he’s been selling since 1974 and auctioning for four years. The staff had to do a lot of research on the web, one staffer noted, because some of the cameras were so obscure. They finally found a website of experts who knew cameras.

The cameras were lined up on shelves in glass cases taken from Edward K. Kaprelian's home.

“I love it. I love looking at it,” said Fuller, who on this day was wearing a colorful crazy quilt of a bow tie. “I have grown attached to the installation.”

Looking at the cameras on the shelves, I could understand why. They were pristine in the cases, and I was impressed. That’s not usually the look of the cameras I see at auction. He and another staffer explained: These were dusty when they were first retrieved, and the staff had to clean them up.

The collection also included movie cameras.

“We’re selling them as objects,” Fuller said, primarily for camera collectors. “They may or may not work.” Some cameras were still in their cases, he said, and others still had film in them (I’ve bought cameras like that before – mostly 35mms that still had batteries in them, a definite no-no).

This grouping was described as the crème de la crème. Next year, about 1,000 cameras and 4,000 volumes of books are scheduled to be sold. “He had everything imaginable,” one staffer told the 25 or so of us in the audience. “All are being catalogued.”

These press cameras were once used by newspaper photographers.

That’s a large haul, so I wondered where Kaprelian kept all of this stuff. On one floor of his home, said auction staffer Gary Pelkey. They were in the same cases that now lined the walls of the auction house. Another staffer mentioned that they were also in the garage and in boxes.

“He would open his garage on Saturdays” and people would bring cameras to sell, according to Pelkey.

Kaprelian was considered an expert on photography and its accoutrements. He was born in 1913 and received a master’s degree in engineering in 1934. After working in Washington, he joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps Engineering Labs in Fort Monmouth, NJ, where he served as chief. The Army in 1945 turned over to him  a collection of Carl Zeiss lens that it had retrieved from the Germans. Kaprelian became an expert in Zeiss lens. His collection at auction included a number of them.

He later was hired as chief engineer at the Kalart Co., which manufactured cameras and photography equipment. In the 1960s, he was the deputy in an Army lab called Limited War Laboratory. A 1965 Popular Science magazine article described it as an elite club of scientists who basically spent their time thinking up and developing weaponry and other devices to help fight the Vietnam War.

Kaprelian holds 50 U.S. and foreign patents, ranging from optical and photography to smoke detectors to wound-treatment apparatus for surgery.

In 1985, he catalogued the collection at the Fleetwood Museum in North Plainfield, NJ, that consisted of 800 cameras. According to the museum website, he designed the showcases and the opening display. Like Kaprelian, the museum’s collection appears to be a walk-through history of photography.

Early box cameras were among those sold.

At the auction, the Kaprelian cameras were not terribly expensive (even though they pulled in more than I normally pay at auction). Fewer than 20 were sold for more than $500, and many went for less than $200. Near the end, most of the bids were being offered over the internet.

Here are some of the prices and descriptions from the auction catalog. The prices do not include an 18 percent premium:

A Leica 250 Reporter body.

The most expensive. A Leica 250 Reporter body. An early model FF converted to GG in nickel finish with a top speed of 1/1000 second. Manufactured by Ernst Leitz in Wetzlar, Germany, circa 1934. Includes rare Bakelite body cap. $2,250.

Criterion 8x10 View Camera.

Criterion 8×10 View Camera with T.T. &H. 13-inch Series VI Cooke portrait lens. Manufactured by Gundlach-Optical Co. in Rochester, NY. $850.

Kodak No. 1A Autographic Junior Camera.

Kodak No. 1-A Autographic Junior Camera. Manufactured by Eastman Kodak Co. in Rochester, NY. $10.

Phoenix Tropical Folding Plate Camera.

Phoenix (Phonix) Tropical Folding Plate Camera with polished teak wood body, brass hardware, Lumar lens and Rulex shutter. Manufactured by Wilhelm Kenngott in Stuttgart, Germany, circa 1924. $275.

Heidoscop Stereo Camera.

Heidoscop Stereo Camera with 3 Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar lenses and leather case. Manufactured by Franke & Heidecke in Braunschweig, Germany. $700.

Rochester Optical Company Premier Box Plate Camera.

Rochester Optical Company Premier Box Plate Camera. Manufactured in the USA, circa 1889-1903. $40.

Army Signal Corps KS-6 (1) Camera.

U.S. Army Signal Corps KS-6 (1) Camera Set. Includes a KE-4 70mm Roll Film Camera with 2 Kodak Ektar lenses (102mm and 205mm), flash unit, filters and film in a metal Halliburton case. Manufactured by Graflex Inc. in Rochester, NY (A buyer seated next to me – who bought a whole lotta cameras – said these were hard to sell. “People like them,” he explained, “but they don’t want to pay $2,000 for them.”). $1,200.

A prototype drawing of the Victor Movie Camera by Raymond Loewy Associates in 1949.

Original 1949 Raymond Loewy Associates drawing of a prototype design for a 16mm Victor Movie Camera with related documentation, invoices and correspondence. Raymond Loewy was commissioned by the Victor Animatographic Corp. in Davenport, Iowa, to design a new 16mm motion picture camera. The drawing is colored pencil on paper, matted with an 8-ply mat. It was given to Kaprelian by Morris Schwartz, founder of the Kalart company. $325.

“This belongs in a  museum,” one auction staffer said of the drawing. The same was true of many of the items in the sale.

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But there he was – Lt. James Wiley – in a black and white photo. I only recall that he was looking into the camera because the documentary didn’t linger on the photo. It was chock full of images of African American pilots who trained during World War II to fight in Europe for a country that doubted their ability to even fly airplanes.

Col. Benjamin O. Davis Jr. (left), one of the first Tuskegee Airmen and later their most famous leader, and an unidentified pilot. Photo from the Library of Congress' Toni Frissell Collection.

I had learned of Wiley while trying to identify African American soldiers in two photos I had bought at auction. The photos were stamped “U.S. Army Air Corps,” so I assumed they were Tuskegee Airmen. A friend of Wiley’s family identified him as one of the soldiers.

The documentary is called “Double Victory,” in reference to their fighting for victory against racism at home and fascism in Europe. It is a prelude to the George Lucas film “Red Tails” scheduled to be released on Jan. 20, 2012. This riveting documentary is currently being shown in five cities to whip up support for the movie, which tells of the exploits of the Tuskegee Airmen of the 99th Fighter Squadron, the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Bombardment Group. The documentary will also be aired on Jan. 20 on the History channel.

I attended one of those screenings last night. Two airmen wearing light blue jackets and blue “Tuskegee Airmen” caps talked about their experiences as part of a panel accompanying the documentary, while others sat in a special row of chairs among a packed audience. The panelists apparently didn’t see any combat; the war ended in 1945 before they could ship out.

Lucas financed the project with his own money – $58 million to make the movie and $35 million to distribute it, according to the Wall Street Journal. The movie includes combat scenes that will remind viewers of Star Wars, the visual effects supervisor told the newspaper. I saw the trailer online, and those scenes were “wow.”

This is not the first film about the airmen. In 1995, HBO produced a TV movie titled “The Tuskegee Airmen” starring Laurence Fishburne.

A poster for the George Lucas movie "Red Tails."

The Lucas movie stars Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding (he was also in the HBO movie), along with Method Man. The documentary starts with a few of the actors extolling the bravery of the airmen, who pressed on when many white officers and pilots refused to fly or associate with them. The men and their all-black units were thwarted at every turn, but they wouldn’t give up because as one said, this was his country, too, and his ancestors helped build it.

“We wanted to fly,” another announced succinctly in the documentary, a testament to our basic desire to aspire and succeed.

Lt. James Wiley was one of those brave souls. He was among the first 24 pilots of the 99th Fighter Squadron who landed in North Africa in 1943. They started their action with daily missions in Italy, flying some of the military’s worst planes in attacks on enemy gun sites in the Pantelleria Island campaign.

Some of the research I came across had indicated that the airmen primarily escorted bombers to their targets, but the documentary made it clear that they also participated in independent air raids. After hearing of their successful missions, some white bomber pilots even requested the Tuskegee airmen. The squadron became part of the 332nd under the leadership of Col. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., and painted the tails of their P-51C aircraft red to identify themselves. They became known as the “Red Tails.”

The documentary contained its share of the “trials and tribulations” of black men trying to become pilots in the 1940s, but I’m hoping that the movie goes beyond that. I hope that it shows the camaraderie of men helping each other – as they mentioned in the documentary – and the good times they carved out for themselves in the midst of the crazy quilt of racism.

I can’t wait to see the film, primarily for what panel moderator Ed Gordon said the documentary demonstrated: That “heroes can be black, too.” And indeed these men were.

A poster for the documentary about the Tuskegee Airmen.

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Recently, I got an email from another reader who had come across a similar photo showing African American soldiers standing in front of a barracks. She had taken the photo to several antiques shops hoping they could tell her something about the men in uniform.

“I have been trying to get it appraised but no antique shops can tell me for sure what war it’s from or how much it is worth,” she wrote. “Someone said they think it is ww2.

African American soldiers at Camp Robinson, AK, during World War II.

“My photo is black and white and it’s rolled up because it’s extremely long,” she wrote. “The picture looks very similar to the one of yours of the 10 men standing in uniform. … the uniform they are wearing is the same and it looks like the same time period. The soldiers’ names are all written on to the picture as well as the words ‘camp ark 392.’”

The woman – Michelle, who lives in Michigan – wanted help in identifying the photo, and intrigued, I offered my assistance. I was also curious about how she came across it.

“My dad bought an enclosed trailer for hauling equipment and while my uncle was feeling around a ledge up top he pulled out this picture,” she wrote.

Michelle sent me copies of the photo, which measured 8″ x 46.” Some of the men’s ranks and first and last names were inked over their individual photos. The words “392 Eng, Camp Robinson, Ark.,” was written below the name of a Sgt. Arthur Wall.

With a camp name, I started researching via Google, and found that the men may have belonged to the 92nd Infantry Division or the 392nd General Service Regiment, both of which were stationed at Camp Robinson in North Little Rock during World War II. Here’s what I found about both units:

Buffalo Soldiers' patch.

The 92nd Infantry Division was known as the Buffalo Soldiers, taking the name from one given black troops by Native Americans nearly 100 years before. The original 92nd was organized in 1917 and had fought in France during World War I. It was re-activated in 1942, and soldiers were trained at Fort McClellan, AL; Camp Atterbury, IN; Camp Breckinridge, KY, and Camp Robinson.

The unit’s mascot was a buffalo on an olive background on a circular shoulder patch, and its official publication was called “The Buffalo.”

The 92nd was the last division of the segregated Army. The enlisted men and most of the junior officers were African Americans, but the senior officers were white. The division consisted of 12,000 soldiers.

The soldiers trained at Camp Robinson until May 1943, then left for Fort Huachuca, AZ, for more training. The division ended up in Italy in the summer of 1944 and was the only black division engaged in combat in Europe, as part of the Fifth Army. Most black soldiers were involved in construction or supply details or other similar work. The soldiers of the 92nd were mostly Southerners who had endured insults both in training and in the service, and did not receive adequate training.

For their efforts, they were awarded some of the Army’s top medals, and several – including Capt. Charles F. Gaudy Jr. of Washington, DC – were cited for their bravery against the Germans.

The “392 Eng”: This may refer to the 392 Engineer General Service Regiment. From Camp Robinson, the unit was sent to Camp Claiborne in Louisiana and then to Camp Shanks in New York. It apparently was an African American regiment that like other such regiments helped to build and repair bridges, roads and other structures in Europe during the war. 

My research also took me to the 2008 Spike Lee movie “Miracle at St. Anna,” about four 92nd Infantry Buffalo Soldiers holed up in an Italian village in Tuscany in 1944 – a movie that I had seen and now had found an historical connection.

Were the soldiers in the photo part of the 92nd or the 392 Engineers? I don’t know, but I’m sure some World War II history buff has the answer for both me and Michelle. That person also may know the value of the photo.

Can you help identify the men more precisely?

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I saw them the moment I entered the box-lot room and immediately headed toward them. It was an enlarged version of a photo with foam backing, suitable for framing. I checked the back but found nothing to identify the men, the circumstances of the photo or the date. Who were they, I wondered.

The eight men were standing in front of a trolley car with the number 52 at the top. I assumed the photo was taken in Philadelphia, which has long had an extensive transportation system that still includes trolley cars. I put the photo back in its place, not sure if I would bid on it or not.

This appears to be a photo of the first black motormen for Philadelphia's transit system. They went to work on Aug. 1, 1944, and white workers went on strike in protest.

But it continued to nag me. Even without knowing who these men were, I knew this was a historical photo and that there must be a story behind it. First, I searched for 52nd Street trolley, and found that there had been one. According to one site, it was operated by the Philadelphia Transportation Co. (PTC), became a bus line in 1956 and was now known as Route K.

On further research, I found that the 52 line was insignificant in this photo. The story, as I thought when I first saw the photo, was the eight men. It appeared to be a photo of the first black motormen for the Philadelphia transit system. Their promotion sparked a week-long wildcat strike in August 1944 by white workers protesting the hiring of African Americans in jobs that they considered “white only.”

I found a photo of one of the black motormen, James Stewart, as he was being trained by a white worker aboard a trolley. He appears to be the fifth person from the left in the auction photo.

This was amazing. This strike was considered historically significant in the overall fight against discrimination in the work place and for the enforcement of civil rights laws by the federal government.

Streetcars or trolleys had been in Philadelphia since the 1850s, starting as horse-drawn and then becoming electrical around 1915. Early on, blacks were not even allowed to ride them, until the late-19th century when Octavius Catto spearheaded a campaign to change that. He organized what would now be called trolley sit-ins, leading to a state bill that outlawed segregated streetcars.

By the 1940s, blacks could not get a job as a streetcar operator, and were routinely hired instead in menial jobs. A few years before the strike, the NAACP and other groups repeatedly petitioned the PTC to allow blacks to be trained for better jobs as motormen, conductors, bus drivers and station clerks. Both the company and union balked.

Impatient with this foot-dragging, the federal government forced the PTC to hire (or promote) blacks for 100 jobs that had recently come open. The eight black workers started on Aug. 1, 1944, and in protest, nearly 10,000 white workers went on an unauthorized strike. For nearly a week, trolleys, buses and trains did not move and the city was paralyzed.

At the time, the country was in the middle of World War II, and Philadelphia had proven itself as a major producer of war materials. When the streetcars stayed in their carbarns – that’s what the storage areas were called – very few people went to work, so production stopped. President Roosevelt sent in the Army to take over the PTC and operate the transit system.

A closeup of the front of the 52 trolley.

Invoking the Smith-Connally Act forbidding strikes in war-related industries, Roosevelt gave the men an ultimatum: return to work or face losing their jobs or having their draft deferments lifted. A day later, the white workers were back on the job. By year’s end, 900 blacks had been hired by the company.

Here’s the reaction of some of the eight workers, taken from a paper by labor historian James Wolfinger about the strike:

“They all told reporters they thought of themselves as pioneers and that, with the government’s help, they would make it. Their ‘implicit faith’ in the government, as one reporter put it, led them to believe federal authorities would ‘take swift action to guarantee [their] rights’. Some still had nagging doubts, however, about what the strike said about American society. One of the drivers’ wives, after telling a reporter her husband had served nine months in the south Pacific, said, ‘What I wonder about is whether the sacrifice was worth it?’ When the strike ended a few days later and African Americans began taking trolleys out on their runs, most of the city’s blacks would have answered yes to her question.”

At the auction, as I stood waiting for other items to come up for bids in the box-lot room, another auction-goer spotted the photo and said quickly, “I want that.” I didn’t say a word, because deep inside I knew that I wanted it, too, but I still wasn’t sure I’d bid on it. He’d probably try to sell it; I wanted to keep it for myself.

Unfortunately, I had just stepped away with another purchase when the photo came up for auction. A few minutes later, the other auction-goer walked up to me with it in his hands. I had missed it. Darn.

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Imagine my surprise this week when I flipped through some framed photos and actually came across something that was unusual. The first was a black and white photo of a mother and her young son glued to a board, her holding an open book.

The mother reading to her son, accompanied by a poem alluding to the stories.

That was not so different. What distinguished it was a verse printed in an adult script to the right of the photo. It was written in the voice of the boy, and it began …

“Just before I go to bed

Mummy reads to me,

And then she sings and all my head

Gets sleepy as can be.”

Curious, I kept digging in the box to see if there were others like it, and I found three more. The boy was alone in those photos, and they were also accompanied by verse. I could imagine all four photos hanging together, proudly, on a wall in the mother’s living room or in the child’s room. They were testimony to a mother’s love.

I initially wondered if the verses were hers or were copied from an actual poem. In reading further, I found a line in one poem indicating that she had written them for her son, who looked to be about 4 years old.

Finding these kinds of expressions (or just coming across photos in general) always gets my mind to wondering about who these people were. There was nothing printed on the photos or the paper that identified them. That’s usually the case with photos from the past; people and places are rarely identified. Likely because the folks who took the photos knew the people who were in them at the time, never thinking that the photos would outlast them and the names would be lost forever.

The pictures of the boy and his mother were among several groupings of photo albums and single photos on the auction tables that day. One pile included vintage proofs from a long-gone (I’m sure) studio in Harrisburg, PA.

I found the verses accompanying the mother-and-son photos pretty special. So I’m sharing them along with the photos:

Here’s the full verse from the first photo:

“Just before I go to bed

Mummy reads to me,

And then she sings and all my head

Gets sleepy as can be.”

There’s Penny wag and River-land,

And Sherwood at the dawn;

The Perez mouse, the Train that Could

Queen Anne’s Lace on the lawn.

This story’s ‘bout some brigands bold,

It’s really lots of fun!

When Mummy says it’s all been told

I wish she’d just begun.

The songs of moon-boats, stars and things

And cavaliers I know;

But most I like it when she sings

the sleepy Sweet and Low.”

(Note: Could the world “Sherwood” be referring to Alfred Noyes’ “A Song of Sherwood”?)

(You can listen to the song “Sweet and Low” here.)

The boy after discovering the first signs of spring.

“Spring’s here, Mum! I know it’s so

Come quickly and I’ll tell you why -

I tried to pick a dandelion

And found it was a butterfly.

Bingo and I have lots to do

We haven’t time to listen to more;

Before the sunshine day is through

We have the whole big world to explore!”

The boy playing farmer.

“This is my farm with the cows in the dells,

and the sheep on the hills with their tinkly bells,

The horses are patiently waiting for hay

So I’ll go on playing now if I may.

A farmer’s what I want to be

And fill my barn with wheat,

And milk the cows or feed the chicks,

And hear the stray lamb bleat.”

The boy at his desk, looking business-like.

“I’m working hard and business-like,

Don’t interrupt me cuz

I’m scribbling lots and call it verse

The way my Mummy does.

Architecture is my line,

I build the modern way;

Houses made of all windows

So you can see the day.”

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I was taking photos of the photo for my blog, but still admiring it and thinking that I’d love to have it on my wall. I didn’t get a bid paddle, just to make sure I did not buy anything at the auction, although it was for a worthy cause. The works were donated by photographers to help raise money for scholarships.

The man wanted this particular photo among at least 70 or more up for sale at a National Association of Black Journalists’ (NABJ) auction last weekend during its annual convention. The word was that an estimated 2,500 journalists, students, educators and others came to Philadelphia to partake of learning and training sessions, to see old friends and to honor journalists who had done good work.

The auction, sponsored by the group’s Visual Task Force, was just as much a fixture at the convention as the  W.E.B DuBois lecture, the Sports Task Force awards program, the screening of the hottest new film featuring black actors and the awards gala. I had always looked forward to the photo auction when I’d attended the convention in the past.

In fact, I bought a photo once much like this one. It showed a group of African refugees on a road at dusk, the colors all purples and blacks. It hung on my wall until I rearranged some artwork recently.

The African girls were photographed by photographer Brian Branch Price in Gomoa Tekyiam, Ghana, last September. It was part of his Obaatan Project, after a faith-based organization called Obataan Mobilization Against Poverty that helps poor women and children. The organization assisted the village last fall after a major flood.

A photo of a senior pharmacist in his white coat fitted into a tight space among shelves of pills and other medicines also caught my eye. It had a look of antiquity, unlike the bright lights and wide aisles of today’s pharmacies, which are not places to themselves but offshoots of stores that sell a lot more than pills. The photo by photographer Gary Porter was like a throwback jersey among the more contemporary pieces in the auction. I checked out some of his other works on the web. Fantastic.

It reminded one convention volunteer of her Uncle Randall who worked in a pharmacy in Philadelphia back in the 1940s.

I was taken with the photo because it reminded me of the stuff I see at my regular auctions – the pieces of a person’s past that the families don’t know what to do with after they’re gone. I always come across single photos and photo albums taken from a time that this pharmacy seemed to represent. In this auction, though, there was a decided difference: These photos were offered by the owners themselves for a very good cause.

The pharmacist photo was not the only vintage-looking one. Two 1957 black-and-white photos of Louis Armstrong by photographer Bob Moreland were for sale. I was sure that those would be among the top money-makers. Here’s another Moreland of Satchmo in a cloud of smoke at the Manhattan Casino in St. Petersburg, FL.

Once the auction began, it was very informal. The would-be auctioneer warned us beforehand that it was all in good fun: “We have one rule,” Fred Sweets, who for years was a photographer and photo editor at the Associated Press, said. “We have no rules.”

And he was right. He joked with the audience and they joked back. He called out to friends and they came right back at him. He lingered and he joked some more. It was not what I was used to, but as he indicated, it was not your typical auction. Sweets noted that he was starting the bids at prices based on how much he liked the photo. I was not there for the entire auction (it lasted for at least 2 ½ hours), but the first few started at $50.

The photo of the little girls was among the first to come up. The man who wanted it got into a bidding war with another woman who wanted it just as badly. I sat and watched in awe as the bidding raced past $100, then to past $300 and then to $500. The man backed off and someone else stepped in. “I thought you wanted it,” I said over his shoulder as I sat behind him. “I can’t go beyond $500,” he said. A few minutes later, though, he jumped back in and finally got the photograph for $750.

At these auctions, folks are willing to pay more because they know they are contributing to NABJ and its programs.

I wasn’t around when the Satchmo photos were sold, but I was told that the one with him and his trumpet went for $1,000 and the other one for less. Neither was I around for the pharmacist but decided to return to the auction site later to see if it sold. I was this close to buying it if it was still there. It did not sell at auction, I was told, but a buyer got it outside the auction for $75. Lovely, the old guy deserved to go home with someone.

Here are some other photos from the auction:

The Old Spice commercial guy, Isaiah Mustafa. This one was a looker. $75.

A mother’s pain. Photographer Milt Brown took a photo of a mother whose son was shot by Chicago police. $75.

Saxophonist Clarence Clemons, $75.

Autographed photo of golfers Ben Hogan and Brian Wilson, $200.

Alex Garcia’s photo of a 7-year-old girl with sickle cell anemia on a trip to Macy’s. She wants to be a singer, according to Sweets. The photo was a burst of orange against her deep chocolate skin. The colors were brilliant. No sale.

Jim Walker’s photo of a Feb. 15, 1960, sit-in by Norcom High School students at Roses Department store in Portsmouth, VA. Not far from it was a 50-years-later reunion photo of the Norfolk 17 student protesters. The Portsmouth photo ran in Life magazine on Feb. 29, 1960. Caption: “Backed by jostling crowd, Negroes stay unserved during lunch counter sit-down protest.” Whites and blacks fought that day in the shopping center parking lot after the protest.

Little girl and perhaps her grandmother dressed to the nines. Photo by Chris Zuppa.

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At this house, though, the people in the photos or their descendants had let nature run its own path, unimpeded, away from prying eyes. These folks were isolated and apparently liked it that way.

The auctioneer stood at a table of their stuff, holding the family photos, almost pleading for one of us to take them home. He dropped the bidding to $2, lingered there for a moment, and then to $1. We just stared at him, uninterested. Finally, he added a few other items to the lot, and finally someone took the stuff off his hands.

For some of us, our ancestors' faces are not even a blur because we have no photos of them.

Those were not the only images. As I made a walk-through of the house, I came across two large paintings of what seemed to be the same people (or at least another pair of relatives) hanging on a bedroom wall. Those, too, were up for sale, along with closets full of clothes, still-made beds holding folded linens, several boxes of hats, beautiful antique furniture and even dishes in the kitchen.

Seeing those photos made me wonder again why family members don’t keep old photos of their relatives. Some of us don’t have them and wish that we did. I don’t know what my great-grandmothers looked like (my family did find a photo of my great-grandfather on my mother’s side). Do I resemble (or as we southerners call it, favor) one of them?

When I hear of people who go searching for their relatives – either now or in the past – I understand that strong desire to know. That’s why I was taken with two pieces written in the last month or so by Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Daniel Rubin. They were about two families who had searched for and found their ancestors.

One had images of his people, the other did not, but their missions were similar.

The first was the story of a man who was related to Hiram Charles Montier and his wife Elizabeth Brown Montier, whose portraits were exhibited by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2009. They were among the earliest portraits of African Americans, believed to have been painted around 1841. The portraits were loaned by the Montiers’ descendants. Hiram Montier was a bootmaker and descendant of the son of Philadelphia’s first mayor.

Hiram Charles Montier and his wife Elizabeth Brown Montier. Their portraits were exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Their descendant, Bill Pickens, had spent 21 years searching for their graves and found them in Eden Cemetery in Collingdale, PA, with the assistance of the cemetery’s historian.

The second was the story of a man who as a child lost contact with his father who was in a German concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria. Sol Finkelstein last saw his father in 1945 when the Germans led his father and others on a forced death march. Finkelstein’s son had learned on his own that the father had survived the march, and had been liberated by the Allies and taken to a hospital, where he died of typhus a few days later.

According to the column, Ancestry.com and the U.S. Holocaust Museum have made the task of ancestor-searching easier for families of victims. They have digitized and indexed millions of Nazi documents that in a few weeks will be accessible online.

A researcher at the museum found a photo and ID card of Finkelstein’s father, according to the column. He keeps a copy near his bed and his TV so he can see his father’s face as often as he likes. I understand.

Related posts:

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2. Black images and America’s shameful past
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What turned up on this day was a book with so much writing on the front I could barely figure out who published it. The title was in bigger letters so it stood out: A History of the Civil War. Brady War Photographs. 1861-1865.

A history book on the Civil War waiting to be auctioned.

I recognized the name Brady, a photographer famously known for his photos of battles and men during the Civil War. I flipped through the book, interested because the country is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the war fought over the fate of my ancestors.

The rest of the text on the cover seemed to blend together in my mind, one stacked atop the other, endlessly, it seemed: War Department. Sixteen Sections. Great Battlefield Series. Section 1. War Memorial Association. New York.

The first inside page noted that this was a chronological summary and record compiled from the official records of the War Department commemorating the 50th anniversary of the “Great National Struggle.” This was a recounting of the history of the war using reproductions of photographs by Mathew B. Brady. It was written by historian Benson J. Lossing and published around 1911.

As usual, I flipped through the book to see if there were any photographs of African American soldiers but didn’t come across any prominent ones. There were a biography and photo of Brady, and a photo of Abraham Lincoln and the text of his Gettysburg Address.

Also included was an 1864 photo of Confederate lines north of Atlanta. The text beneath it was headlined “The New South.”

A photo of the Confederate lines near Atlanta and a speech about the "New South."

“There was a South of slavery and secession – that South is dead,” Atlanta newspaper editor Henry W. Grady pronounced in a speech recounted on the page. “There is a South of union and freedom – that South, Thank God, is living, breathing, growing every hour.”

Grady made the speech before the New England Club in New York in 1886, according to the book. At the time, he was using his influence to create and promote a new refurbished image of the South after the war. (Too bad not enough of his compatriots agreed with him.)

Among war photographers, Mathew Brady was the most noted, but he had a counterpart in the South. That man was George S. Cook, who was born in Connecticut but settled in Charleston, SC, in 1849. Cook was said to have captured the country’s first war photograph of a group of Union gunboats firing on Fort Moultrie, SC, in 1863. He was inside Fort Sumter at the time. The images, however, are fuzzy and unfocused.

Mathew B. Brady in an 1875 photo.

Photography was not new to the country. It had been around for years, but the war brought it into prominence. Images of gruesome battle scenes brought the Civil War-era population face to face with the stench of war just as TV footage of the Vietnam War would do the same for us 100 years later.

The New York Times wrote in 1862, a month after the Battle of Antietam: “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”

One account said more than 3,000 photographers covered the war, most of them freelancers who mostly did studio portraits of soldiers in uniforms. A few such as Brady and his workers ventured out into the field. In fact, Brady’s eyesight was so bad that most of the photographs attributed to him were done by the workers he supervised, such men as Alexander Gardner and Timothy H. Sullivan, among others. Many of the photographers sold their works to newspapers and magazines.

The book also contained other Brady’s photos:

Slave pen next to building at far right that sold Africans into slavery.

A Slave Pen in Alexandria, VA. The sign on the building next to it says “Price Birch & Co. Dealers in Slaves.” Alexandria was a center of the slave trade during the 19th century, sending Africans to Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and other cotton-producing states, according to a history of the city. It had one of the country’s largest slave-trading firms, Franklin and Armfield.

President Lincoln at a Union camp.

President Lincoln with Allan Pinkerton (left) and Maj. Gen. J.A. McClearnand. Pinkerton was founder of the country’s first detective agency and is said to have prevented an assassination attempt on the president’s life in 1861.

Mathew B. Brady (far right) with Union soldiers.

Mathew B. Brady (far right) with Gen. Potter and staff. Robert Brown Potter fought at Antietam, helping to dislodge Confederate troops at what became known as Burnside’s Bridge.

The 15-inch Rodman gun from the Civil War.

 Largest gun mounted in the war. This is a photo of the 15-inch Rodman cannon at Battery Rodgers in Alexandria, VA.

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