Newsletter readers can now see a special Spring Clearance Sale on I Photo Central brought to you by all five of the website's photography dealers. These items are available at special sale prices (from 20 to over 70% off the regular list price) for just one month, from now until May 31st. Many of the items' regular list prices were reduced earlier, so the actual net reductions may be well over 30% to 80% in many instances. These are all final prices, so no other discounts apply. Shipping/insurance may also be added.

There are some great deals, so check them out soon at: http://www.iphotocentral.com/sale/sale.php .

If you want to do further sorts on the sale list, you can go to the Search Images page at http://www.iphotocentral.com/search/search.php and put MaySale1 into the key word field. Then you can also use the other search fields, such as price range, country, date range, etc. When you have all your choices made, simply hit the Search button (not the Show All Images button). When you put in the key word, you must have the capital letters in properly and no space between the words or the number "1". Also make sure you do not have any extra space after the key word. This way if you are bargain hunting, you can put in a range from $1 to $500, or if you want to focus on the top end, just put in a range from $1000 (or $5000) to No Limit.

Here is a sampling of some of the top work on sale:
--Alfred Eisenstaedt, V-J Day Times Square, NY 1945. This was a gift from Eisenstaedt to the current owner. Sale price: $12,000.
--A quarter-plate daguerreotype of several stores in Jersey City, NJ. Sale price: $15,000.
--A vintage print of one of Berenice Abbott's most well-known images (the Snuff Shop). Sale price: $12,500.
--A vintage color print of Marilyn Monroe by Richard Avedon. Sale price: $9,000.
And nearly 1,250 additional photographs in every price range are on sale.

To help introduce a new feature on the website, a number of photography dealers on I Photo Central are also running a special Book Sale offer on most of the new books we have posted up on line at a 20% discount price. You will also save shipping costs if you order $250 or more per dealer.

Now on the site there are some of the rarest and most sought-after books and portfolios, including Henri Cartier-Bresson's magnus opus "The Decisive Moment"; dozens of signed books from leading photographers (such Eggleston, Kertesz, Friedlander, Sudek, Avedon, Lyon, Teske, Clark, Sturges, Weston, Bernhard, Davidson, Mapplethorpe, Witkin, Shibata, Siskind, Warhol, Michals, Doyle, Levinson, Fee, Fuss, Webb and others); and some of the hardest to find incunabula from the earliest days of photography, for instance, the collected papers presented at the Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1839 announcing the invention of photography, including the famous report by Arrago, a 19th-century reproduction of the correspondence between Daguerre and Niepce, and a Rare 1851 First Volume of the influential Journal La Lumiere--only about a dozen copies exist, most in French public institutions. Also included are photo-illustrated books and portfolios, such as Peter Henry Emerson's "The Compleat Angler" and "Wild Life on a Tidal Water", plus many modern portfolios and books with prints. There is also a Portfolio of Sixteen Photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn, 1962 with an introduction by Nancy Newhall on sale for $280 and "Lee Friedlander Photographs", including two original prints by Friedlander, which consistently goes at auction for $16,000 and is sale priced at $12,800.

Of course, there are also many other very low priced photography books listed on the site that can fill in your library or make great presents. And many more books will be added to the list over the next months (and beyond), so keep checking back.

The Book Sale can also be found at: http://www.iphotocentral.com/sale/sale.php . Nearly 200 books are in the May sale.

While the books can be searched on the regular Search pages with the drop-down menu on media (just select "books"), we expect to soon have an entirely separate photography bookstore--the first such multi-dealer version on the web.

I encourage bookstores with a photography orientation to contact me at 1-215-822-5662 for details on how to join I Photo Central and put inventory into this new internet resource. And I encourage our newsletter readers to go and see the many rare photography books currently on sale on the site. Many are rare first edition and signed copies. Others will make great additions to any research library.
 

Artcurial will hold a two-part photography sale, its main auction of the Spring, on Tuesday, May 15th, at 8 pm and on Wednesday, May 16th, at 2 pm. The auctions will be held at Artcurial, Hotel Dassault, 7-9 Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées, 75008, Paris, France. A printed catalogue is available for these sales and can be ordered through Artcurial.

Again, the first part of the sale will be held on Saturday, Tuesday, May 15th, at 8 pm at the Artcurial facility in Paris. The auction can be previewed from Friday, May 11-Monday, May 14 from 11 am-7 pm, and on the day of the sale from 11 am-2 pm. There are only 60 lots in Part 1 of the sale-- from the early daguerreotype process to recent Adam Fuss rayograms.

The sale will begin with 14 important daguerreotypes, notably lot 13, La Lettre de l’absent, a daguerreotype by Richou, and one of the better genre scenes to come on the French market (estimated at 25000-30000 euros). Also worth noting is lot 5, a group portrait of an Alsatian family made in 1843 (estimated at 10000-12 000 euros). Also in this portion of the sale is "Le Cheval, Surprise", a very important quarter-plate daguerreotype by Louis Auguste Bisson (estimated at 20000-30000 euros). It was on display at both the Orsay Museum and at the New York Metropolitan Museum in 2003 during the important exhibition of French daguerreotypes.

After a couple of important paper negatives, there are some important prints by Piot and Nègre. Other early 19th-century work includes lot 23, which is of special historical interest. This unique salt paper print by Bayard, a view of Montmartre dated 1842, is one of his first prints from a paper negative. Lot 23bis, the classic Le Gray marine, Brick au Clair de Lune, 1856, is estimated at 15000-20000 euros. The sale also includes some key autochromes, a still undervalued process, notably lot 40, a Poupée by an anonymous photographer from the Lumière brother’s circle. This haunting image is estimated at 3000-4000 euros.

From the 20th century, there are a number of top prints, including a vintage print of "Mademoiselle Anita", the iconic Doisneau photographs of a dreamy young Parisian girl. Doisneau often said it was his favorite picture. The print has a great provenance, coming from the Robert Giraud collection (Giraud was a writer and journalist, who introduced the young Doisneau to Paris' shady nightlife). The estimate is 15000-20000 euros.

The second part of the sale will take place on May 16th at 2 pm, will start with the sale of an important private collection from New York. Patiently built over the last 20 years, this collection is especially strong on the first half of the 20th century, with great work from Misonne, Weston, Abbott and Edward Curtis, just to name a few of the photographers in the collection.

The rest of the sale--from lot 135 to lot 330--is a seductive mix of daguerreotypes, autochromes and prints on paper by the following artists: Abbott, Apfelbaum, Arbus, Atget, Bayard, Beard, Bodine, Baldus, Balance, Bisson Freres, Blanc Et Demilly, Boubat, Bourne, Brassaï, Cartier-Bresson, Charnay, Christenberry, Clift, De Cock, Constant, Curtis, Cuvelier, Danguy, De Meyer, Dieuzaide, Disderi, Doisneau, Du Camp, Echagüe, Eisenstaedt, Emerson, Fassbender, Fenton, Flacheron, Friedlander, Frith, Fuss, Garduno, Gruen, Halsman, Herschtritt, Hong-Oai, Hosoe, Hugo, Hujar, Kenna, Karelin, Lamb, Larsson, Laughlin-Le Gray, Man Ray, Mante & Goldschmidt, Mapplethorpe, Marey, Mayer & Pierson, Misonne, Moulin, Nadar, Naya, Negre, Orkin, Parr, Piot, Pratt, Quinet, Raymond, Rinehart, Ronis, Sabatier Blot, Stettner, Stone, Strand, Sudek, Sutcliffe, Teynard, Thomson, Vishniac, Weegee, Weston, Winogrand, Witkin and Zelma.

The catalogues for both auctions are now online at: http://www.auction.fr/cp/artcurial/ . Just go to the left section on the calendar and click on the photography auction. For catalogue information or to contact the expert for the sale, email Grégory Leroy at gleroy@artcurial.com or call +33 (0) 6 25 94 29 12, or call the general auction number at +33 (0)1 42 99 20 20. When calling from the U.S. add 011 in front and eliminate the (0).
 

The Amon Carter Museum will be closed to the public beginning May 21 for a period of approximately three months to undergo preventive maintenance and repairs on the building's fire suppression system. The museum will reopen for the special exhibitions "Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster" and "Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke". The museum's internal operations will continue as usual.
 

By Matt Damsker

REAL PHOTO POSTCARD GUIDE: THE PEOPLE'S PHOTOGRAPHY.
By Robert Bogdan and Todd Weseloh. 2006, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY. ISBN No. 0-8156-0851-9; 257 pages; 350 plates; hardcover. Information: http://www.SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu .

Nothing defines the collecting impulse--in all its obsessive love for the rare and the arcane--more than the passion for collecting the countless, mostly amateurish photo postcards that flourished so widely across the United States during the first third of the 20th century. Photo postcards epitomize the medium's populist, democratizing spirit in a way that no other photographic trend or style seems to do, and while these slight, postal-conforming rectangles have an inherently comic cast to them--in all their unsophisticated commercial glory, as fliers for barber shops, bakeries, blacksmiths and general stores, or as mementos of marching bands and county fairs--they capture their slices of life with such charm and simplicity that it's impossible not to love, and quite possibly treasure, them.

Certainly, authors Robert Bogdan and Todd Weseloh treasure them. Bogdan is a professor at Syracuse University in New York, while Weseloh is the archivist at the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, and both are among the leading photo postcard collectors of their day, with an exhaustive knowledge of their subject. Indeed, if this handsomely produced book isn't the definitive general guide to understanding, valuing, and collecting photo postcards, nothing is. The authors touch every conceivable base in educating the reader/collector, documenting not only the history of these artifacts but providing extensive criteria for identifying authentic specimens, technical quality, condition, and rarity. They also highlight every known category, to the extreme of including gay and transgender postcards along with the dominant themes of Main Street America.

As they note in their introductory essay, Americans went mad for photo postcards early in the last century: some one billion of them were mailed in 1913 alone, ten times the population of the U.S. at the time. In retrospect, this mania seems quintessentially American--a faddish embrace of a wondrous, mass-produced commodity, a snapshot of local and distant reality that carried with it something of the novelty that would attach, less than a half-century later, to the emergence of television. Suddenly, these photo postcards were the nation's multiform image of itself, infinitely varied yet comfortingly familiar, mustering personality, industry, spectacle, and oddity on the same three-by-five inch screen.