Just Picture It | Maine Antique Digest

Beneath the Surface

“Normal” might be just a setting on the dryer, as coffee mugs tell us, but it is also something human brains crave. It is both amazing and frightening, the speed with which brains make even the most outlandish, unreasonable, or even horrifying things routine.

Years ago, in our schoolhouse days, we had a “kitchen snake,” a small eastern milk snake who traveled the warm, cozy highways created by the paths routed in the plaster for the electrical conduit. He could snuggle up behind the dishwasher for a daily dose of warmth and then slither off to sleep under the bathtub at the other corner of the back of the house, fat and sassy on his diet of crickets and field mice. He would also appear sometimes along the conduit as it emerged from the backsplash by the kitchen sink, resting his chin on the trim and watching the activity at the sink. We were not willing to harm him. There were no easy ways to impede him, and he, whether because of cats or courtesy, mostly stayed out of the way, and we just got to used to him. He lived there. Eight years ago this month, we moved into a snake-free house (and we are occasionally sad about this), and even now, Hollie still catches herself removing dishes from the right-hand side of the sink with a degree of caution, because there might, just maybe, somehow, be a snake.

We do this with big things too (yes, we realize that to many people, a kitchen snake is a big thing), like technological advances. It is now totally normal to get in a pressurized metal can and fly around thousands of feet above the ground at hundreds of miles per hour, for instance, or to zip into town in a vehicle powered by gas combustion in order to get water in plastic tubes. We normalize these crazy things so rapidly, in the grand scheme of humanity, even as they revolutionize our society, and some of the crazy things are completely underrated for their cultural impact.

Take photography, for instance! It changed how we see people, how we see ourselves, how we memorialize and preserve people, places, and things. Identification, criminal investigations, historic events, family history, and perhaps most of all, marketing and sales, have all been impacted by the advent and explosion of the medium of photography. Just imagine how even our small corner of the world would contract if we removed all that we now convey through photos! And to our minds, this is so normal, despite being, in a historical sense, an enormous and recent shift.

Prior to the late ’90s, auction houses often only took a few photos, even if the sale had a print catalog. Those, of course, were “old-school” film photographs, and the majority of images were of small groupings of objects or a few showstopper pieces that were intended to be used in a flyer, a postcard, or other advertising for the sale. At best, you got one photo per object. If the object was desirable enough, you routinely spent enough, or you were willing to pay, you could often contact the auction house to request additional photographs. They would have to take pictures, have the film developed, and then mail you the resulting images. (This became a lot less of a hassle as local film processing places sprang up and as disposable cameras became popular.)

Demand for photographs really reached a fevered pitch with the era of high-quality, full-color catalogs, an era that seems to have almost disappeared as quickly as it began. We look back at this time now and are both astounded and saddened. On the one hand, producing what is basically a well-illustrated book every few weeks, year in and year out, is just a crazy amount of effort and money. It easily costs more than $25,000 for every single catalog, just in printing and mailing costs. The convenience of full-color catalogs created a whole mindset that meant leaving out descriptive words that were made unnecessary because of photos, even leaving out articles—a, an, and the—because you would be surprised how much space they take up in the descriptions of every item in a two-day sale, and in a printed catalog, space is money. On the other hand, what a treasure trove those printed catalogs were—and are. As we mentioned in a recent column, the internet is not actually forever, and there are items captured in those catalogs that cannot be seen anywhere else, not even online.

Anyway, between the internet and more affordable printing, having more photographs became useful, necessary even. You could now furnish all customers with half a dozen images—or more—in full color of all possible angles or desirable details. Of course, photography at this level and scale required a professional photographer to get really good quality shots; and because time is money, there was always an effort to maximize a photographer’s hours by prioritizing shots intended for publication or advertising. The work of necessary detail shots that provide further condition details was often farmed out to a staff member, which only served to highlight the difference between professional photographers and the rest of us.

Few people suffered as much as the photographer during the catalog production process in this era of high expectations, increased volume, and short turnaround. In part, their suffering was due to a discrepancy between the visible portion of a photographer’s work and the actual work. There. He took the photograph. We all saw him. Why will it take 48 hours to get the images? Because adjusting images after the fact, white-balancing them, rotating them, cropping them, resizing and renaming them—all of this took hours at home on a computer. Just keeping that many images in some sort of order is a feat in and of itself! And then there was the additional challenge presented by on-site photography! Most photographers we have known have to be part monkey, climbing ladders and walls to get a great in situ shot.

One of the early delights of Andrew’s career was working with legendary photographer Gavin Ashworth to acquire the necessary images for an article in American Furniture. Gavin was still working with film, and he made the trip to Ohio for images of just three objects. Watching someone like Gavin work is itself art, and Andrew had hours of time because getting just those shots took the better part of two days. Digital photography did speed this part of the process up considerably, but at that time, Gavin’s process involved multiple stages, including preliminary Polaroid images to check the lighting. Then, only after many stages of test shots, only when things were perfect, did the 4 x 5 camera make an appearance.

Now, for a 500-lot auction at Meander, we will take more than 4000 photographs, and while batch processing them saves a huge amount of time, it still takes weeks to accomplish it all. Thankfully, cloud storage is cheap, because it also takes terabytes to store years of auction photographs, and you never know when you might need a high-resolution image for a column, an article, or a lecture slideshow.

But at the same time, it is important not to make the photography too good. You never want something to appear better in photographs than it looks in real life (IRL, as the kids say), but what constitutes an honest photograph is a question made infinitely complicated by lighting. Paint-decorated objects are particularly prone to shifts in color depending on the light, and studio lights, fluorescent warehouse lights, incandescent lights at home, bright sunlight in a parking lot—these can all bring out or suppress different aspects of a color.

Another advantage: photos transcend language! Years ago, Andrew had a buyer in China contact him because he wanted more photographs, but the language barrier between them made articulating and understanding the technical vocabulary involved nigh impossible. The solution? The gentleman printed out the listing photographs, drew on them to highlight the additional things he wanted pictures for, and sent images of his marked-up photos back to the auction house. This made it easy to accommodate his requests and give him the necessary confidence to bid.

Sherlock Holmes once famously told Doctor Watson, “You see, but you do not observe.” One great joy of looking at things all day long is that eventually you do start to observe, to truly see. To take photographs, to take them well, means you learn to look at things in a different way, and sometimes in that moment, the object you are looking at reveals itself as something really special, something interesting, unique, worthy of attention. It is not so much that the objects you are photographing cease to be normal, but rather that for a period of time, you catch a glimpse of how special something normal really is.