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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There were a few cameras, including a Voigtlander, a well-made German brand. The shutter didn’t seem to be working so I bypassed it.

As I meandered around the room – my hands in white surgical gloves because you never know where this stuff has been – I came across two beautiful lenses for a Voigtlander, along with their leather cases. The small lens was dusted with foam particles; the insides of its case had completely disintegrated. The glass lens itself was clean, though.

The other – which looked to be a 135 mm lens – was in pristine condition. I examined the glass to make sure there was no mold, but I recognized the brand and knew it was a good one. I’d come back later to examine both very carefully before bidding.

I moved on to the other tables in the room, and looked over the furniture in the back room and outside. About 30 minutes later I was back at the table with the lenses.

The 135 mm lens was gone. Gone! I did a double-take. Gone! How could it be gone? It was here 30 minutes ago, there in the open, not obstructed by other items. My mind could not fathom that someone had taken the lens – put it in their pocket and walked off with it.

That’s ridiculous, I thought. So I figured that someone had probably taken it over to the Voigtlander camera so they could buy them together – which would be a no-no because they were from different lots. The lens was not there. Nor was it near a Minolta XG-M camera I had seen on another table.

I was so astounded that I found my auction buddy Janet and ranted to her. I still couldn’t believe it.

People stealing items from tables seem to be business-as-usual at auction houses. We’ve been to several where the auctioneers have announced that items they knew were in a lot had been stolen. A month or so ago at this same auction house, one buyer kept shouting that people had taken his merchandise from a table. We just shook our heads, knowing that you can’t just leave your stuff unattended.

Some people assume that the items were your leftovers, that you’d taken what you wanted and left the rest for anyone who wanted it (which some buyers will do, although the auction staff reminds everyone not to take anything left on tables). Other bidders will just outright steal your stuff.

Auctioneers also repeatedly tell buyers to remove their items as soon as they are handed to them. Most of us head straight to our cars to lock away our purchases. Or we ask someone to keep an eye on them as we make trips to our cars.  

This wasn’t the first time I’d felt something was missing from a box lot. A couple weeks ago, I had rifled through a box of small items. When I came back to re-examine, I felt something was missing but I wasn’t sure what. It’s very easy to slip a small item into a pocket and it not be missed.

As for the lens, I was not the only one who noticed that it had disappeared. Another bidder, who also buys cameras, called over one of the auctioneers to point out the theft. There wasn’t much the man could do. They have a hard time catching the thieves, who turn their backs to the surveillance cameras (I didn’t see any cameras in the auction house) as they are taking items, the auctioneer said. He’d look at the cameras to see if he could determine who stole the lens. He told a story of catching a thief once and calling him out on it. The man “surprisingly” found the item tucked inside another item, where he had surreptitiously placed it while he pretended to be searching for it. 

The missing lens and case were similar to the one in this photo on Ebay (it had a starting bid of $149.99).

This buyer kept saying that he just once wanted to catch someone stealing. He’d been buying and selling for more than 25 years, he said, and he’d never been able to catch anyone. I felt a little sorry for the person whom he caught; he was teed off and ready to hurt somebody. He announced that he had intended to bid on the lenses. Me, too, I told him.

Most of the items at auctions go for a pittance, so why steal something you can buy for 5 to 10 bucks (well, maybe not this pair of lens). I suppose that people without a conscience will do just about anything. At auction houses, people are always around when you are scoping out tables, so I still wonder how the thief was able to swipe the lens without being noticed. Maybe he or she does it so often that they are skilled at doing it.

I just don’t understand dishonesty. It’s not what I was taught. It just steals your humanity.

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The Graflex came to mind a few weeks ago when it was mentioned in a news obit about Philadelphia photographer Jack T. Franklin. For more than 60 years, Franklin had aimed his camera at local and national celebrities, sorority and fraternity events, black soldiers during World War II and most importantly, the civil rights movement in Philadelphia.

He died three weeks before the passing last week of photographer Roy DeCarava, who captured black life in Harlem during the same period. The two men were born three years apart during the early part of the 20^th century.

DeCarava was the most famous of the two, and was renowned for his black & white shadowy images. Most people outside Philadelphia may have never heard of Franklin, but he was a fixture at local events in his trademark black beret.

In Franklin’s obit, a woman remembered seeing him walking in their North Philadelphia neighborhood when she was a child (he rode the subway to assignments). “He used to walk through the streets with his Rolleiflex and Graflex cameras,” the woman told a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter.

That statement piqued my interest. I wanted to learn more about Franklin and the cameras he used to tell his stories. And when I heard that DeCarava had died, I wondered the same about him.

I’m familiar with both the Rolleiflex and Graflex cameras. Both are as beautiful as they come. While I never bought a Graflex, I did manage to out-bid someone on a Rolleicord, one of the least expensive in the Rolleiflex series. This one was a Rolleicord Ia, produced between 1937 and 1938.

The Rolleiflex is a German camera that was first produced in 1929 and the first to use roll film. It’s a Twin Lens Reflex Camera (TLR), meaning it has viewing and taking lens mounted on the front. The creators came up with the idea during World War I. They wanted a practical camera to use on the battlefield. Production didn’t come until years later.

Famed photographers Diane Arbus and Ernst Haas both used a Rolleiflex.  

The Graflex Speed Graphic was the camera of choice for early newspapermen. I’ve seen many an old movie with white male reporters, some half-sitting on desks, others in chairs, a Graflex plate camera in hand, waiting for a morsel from the local mayor or police chief. The most famous photograph taken by a Graflex was the World War II image of Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima in 1945, photographed by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal.

Franklin took more than 400,000 photos, which are now housed at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. His news shots of historical events may be the most significant. He covered the 1963 March on Washington, and he was there in 1965 for the Selma to Montgomery protest march, photographing Dr. King and his wife Coretta, along with others.

Franklin got his first camera at age 11 in 1933 when he was given a Brownie camera.  

“The way I treat photography is different from how other people treat it,” Franklin said in a 2006 interview with the Philadelphia Tribune. “…. The idea is to photograph what they’re doing. The atmosphere of the surroundings is very important because that’s telling you what year, so when you see a picture you can say, ‘Oh that was taken in the ’30s.’ That’s the purpose of photography: the main reason is to identify.”

All I could find out about DeCarava’s camera was that he used a 35mm camera. He purchased the first one in 1946 to photograph images he wanted to paint. He soon ditched the paint and kept the camera. One account of his life noted that his mother had used a Brownie Box camera to photograph friends and neighbors.

I can only speculate what type of 35mm camera he used, but here are some types that were available around that time. Most were rangefinder cameras (they focus with a mechanism that measures distances).

Maybe he used a Leica, which was very popular.  DeCarava’s style of black and white dimly lit photos have been likened to those of Henri Cartier Bresson, who used a Leica 35mm rangefinder camera with a 50mm lens. Bresson described the small hand-held camera as a “big passionate kiss, or then again like a shot from a gun or the couch of a psychoanalyst.”

Life magazine photographer Robert Capa used a Leica for his famous war photos. German filmmaker, photographer and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl also used a Leica.

DeCarava’s other choices of rangefinders: Argus Model A that sold for under $10. Argus Model C3, affectionately (or unaffectionately), called the Brick because of its shape and size. I love the look of the C3; it’s a mighty camera. It’s not likely the camera he used. Too heavy.  DeCarava told a Washington Post reporter in 1986 why he chose photos over paintings:

“I didn’t know what I wanted to paint, but photography told me right away,” he said. “I was very shy, scared to death of people, and somehow the camera gave me a license, a way of relating to people.”

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It must have all happened in school, because I don’t remember any troops in my neighborhood in Lizella, Ga., where I grew up. My elementary school was Pleasant Grove Elementary School, and I still recall how big the school seemed to me as a young child. (Years later, when I went back, it looked so small and vulnerable. How large the world seems when you’re small.)

My mind drifted back to those years when I recently came across some Girl Scout handbooks, magazines, equipment catalogs and other ephemera at a local auction. I was one of two bidders on the lot, and I was determined to leave that auction house with it. And I did, for $40 – about $30 more than I had expected to spend.

Once I got them home, I found that I had snagged three vintage Girl Scout Handbooks, from 1934, 1953 and 1954. Two of them had vinyl and faux-leather dust jackets. The jackets had kept those two in very good condition – strong binding on the spine and clean neat pages. One of the jackets had faded the inside front and back end covers, though.

As I flipped through the books, one yielded even more treasures: The membership card of a young girl in a troop in New Jersey. Her name was Florence Albright, and she had neatly printed her signature on the front of the card beneath the Girl Scout Promise. The membership expiration date was 12/57. What provenance!

On the front inside pages of her handbook, Florence had filled in the form:

Name: Florence Albright
Troop number: 156
Hometown: Riverside, NJ
Date awarded her second class badge: May 26, 1955, by Mrs. Mustard.

Glued to a page near the front of the book was a newspaper clipping of an article about Florence receiving the second class pin (Too bad the pin wasn’t included in the lot!). The book also contained a note that looked to be in Florence’s handwriting: “Ask about dance get mother’s name.” The other two books had the handwritten names of the girls who owned them.

Thumbing through the Girl Scout Equipment Catalogs (from 1953-1959) was like walking back in time. There were black & white, and color photos of everything from uniforms (complete with belt, beret, anklets, tie and sash: $10.30) to watches ($16.50) to cameras ($3.50) to badges and pins (most less than 50 cents each) to shoes ($4.50), and more.

The lot also included a Girl Scout Patrol Leaders Handbook in comic-book form, apparently to appeal to young girls, and six of The Girl Scout Leader magazines.

None of the catalogs contained photos of young black girls like myself. I’m sure that at the time, it didn’t occur to any of us in my troop that we were not represented. I’m sure if we had even seen those catalogs that we would’ve been wishing we could afford some of that stuff.

I did find a black girl in the pages of the Patrol Leaders Handbook fraternizing with other Scouts. And surprisingly, the cover of the October 1955 edition of Scout Leader magazine showed a black adult Scout leader in a sea of her white counterparts.

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