Treasures From an Underground Trove

By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: August 18, 2009


For many years there has been a kind of secret museum of photography under the streets of northwest Washington — an immense, windowless, climate-controlled archive with roots reaching back more than a century.
George Shiras III/National Geographic Society and Steven Kasher Gallery


Hunting White Tailed Deer with a Camera, Northern Michigan, 1930, by George Shiras III. Mr. Shiras was a congressman from Pennsylvania from 1903 to 1905.

And since the early 1980s just one man, William C. Bonner, has been the museum’s primary denizen, becoming intimately familiar with its holdings: more than 11 million images richly documenting the life of the 20th century, from Uganda to the Mississippi Delta to remote lamaseries near the Mongolian border. “People don’t realize how beautiful this collection is,” Mr. Bonner said, “and it’s a shame, in a way, that I’m the only one who’s seen many of these pictures.”



The pictures make up the archive of the National Geographic Society, and it was this sentiment, said Mr. Bonner, the society’s archivist, that motivated him and officials there to explore the idea of opening up the holdings to the fine-art market for the first time. National Geographic’s goal is to find private and institutional collectors for the vintage black-and-white prints and later color images.



“Photojournalism has really only recently been recognized in the fine-art world,” said Maura A. Mulvihill, vice president for the society’s image collection and sales. “And we are sitting on this vast, amazing collection, and started wanting to find a way to get it out into the world.”



After considering proposals from several dealers, the society recently chose the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea, which has worked with several other large archives of photojournalistic images. On Sept. 17 the gallery will open its first exhibition of National Geographic pictures — 150 vintage prints from a dozen photographers.



The photographs — many of which were never published in National Geographic magazine, and which Mr. Kasher chose with help from Mr. Bonner — make up a collective portrait of the society’s intrepid early years, when gentlemen explorers like Hiram Bingham, the colorful, self-promoting Yale historian who has been credited with the modern discovery of Machu Picchu, strode the globe with their guns and view cameras and battered steamer trunks. (The society still has a short 1929 letter from Bingham, then a United States senator, declining an invitation to a lecture by Amelia Earhart.)

Works by some of the photographers in the Chelsea show — like images by Herbert G. Ponting, who documented Capt. Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated trip to the South Pole in 1911-12 — are well known and have been represented in the art market before. But most of the pictures will be seen outside the archive for the first time.



There are photos from the Gansu Province of China taken by Joseph F. Rock, a pioneering botanist whose travel accounts were said to have been an inspiration for Shangri-La, the utopia of James Hilton’s novel “Lost Horizon.” There are photos from the turn of the last century by George Shiras, who took some of the earliest nighttime wildlife pictures, using a tripwire hooked to a magnesium flash and to his camera’s shutter. The images, including some of an albino deer, look eerily contemporary, like something you might expect to see elsewhere in Chelsea.



The exhibition also includes work not normally associated with the nature-and-natives reputation of the early National Geographic, like the obsessive, homoerotic pictures of Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, a German photographer known for his idyllic nude studies of young Sicilian boys. (The show will also include other, lesser-known examples of von Gloeden’s pictures of girls.) And there will be a selection of photographs showing flight experiments from 1907 to 1909, taken in Nova Scotia by members of the lab of Alexander Graham Bell, one of the society’s founders.



“Very little of this material exists anywhere else, because many of these pictures were taken specifically for National Geographic and they have the only copies,” said Mr. Kasher, who has previously overseen sales of images from the archives of The New York Times, The Daily News in New York and Magnum, the photo agency. Though prices for the prints have not been definitively set, they will probably range from $3,000 to more than $10,000 each, he said.



The society’s archive was in Washington during its early years and then moved to Gaithersburg, Md., in the late 1970s. But in 1996 it moved back to the society’s Washington headquarters on 17th Street, into a 2,000-square-foot underground room, designed by Mr. Bonner and lined with motorized shelves. “We call it the very foundation on which National Geographic sits,” said Ms. Mulvihill, who added that because the society is now, like many other institutions, digitizing its archives, the way was cleared to consider selling the original material from a stockpile of slightly less than a half-million vintage prints.



The archive also includes glass-plate negatives and one of the world’s most important collections of autochromes, the earliest examples of color photography. In a walk-in refrigerated vault near the main archive room, the society stores hundreds of thousands of delicate 35-millimeter color transparencies and negatives, and its hard drives hold hundreds of thousands more images taken since the advent of digital photography.



Three further exhibitions planned by Mr. Kasher’s gallery will offer new limited-edition color prints made from the society’s negatives and digital files. (Though the society is selling the images, it will retain the digital and publication rights to them.)

Ms. Mulvihill said that while the black-and-white show would contain only a tiny fraction of the society’s vintage prints, National Geographic had decided to hold nothing of that collection back from sale if the right buyers were interested. “In some cases, it would be painful,” she said, “but we would certainly consider the offer.” Revenue from the sales will support the overall mission of the society, which is a nonprofit.



While many of the black-and-white photographs to be exhibited fairly scream National Geographic — Willis Lee’s pristine shots of an icy-looking Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico; Vittorio Sella’s Alpine photographs, an important influence on Ansel Adams; B. Anthony Stewart’s pictures of sooty West Virginia miners — there is probably one picture that will stand out in that regard. It is a portrait from 1921 by Frank Hurley, an Australian adventurer who traveled extensively though New Guinea, showing a woman in traditional, minimal Papuan dress.



“I had to have at least one bare-breasted native in the show,” Mr. Kasher said. “Everyone would have been looking for one and wondering if I didn’t.”