The Matriarch. New York, [1935, printed ca. 1960s]

Steichen made this celebrated photograph for a fundraising campaign for the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies during the first dark days of Nazi Germany.

$25,000

A collection of three mammoth-plate views of Yosemite.. Bradley & Rulofson, 1872

collection of 3 prints: $25,000

Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston, 1853

This is a fine salt print portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe by John A. Whipple, a leading early American portrait photographer.

$25,000

George Frederic Watts. Cameron, October 1865

This splendid portrait is inscribed and signed on the mount by Cameron: “G.F. Watts From Life not enlarged Julia Margaret Cameron.”

$22,000

Collection of Ten Photographs from Mooney’s Pioneering Investigations of the Ghost Dance and Other Native American Circle Dances. Various places, c. 1892-93

The rare and important collection documents the famous Ghost Dance and related circle dances soon after Wounded Knee. The collection testifies to the tragic demise of the Native American spiritual and cultural practices during the tumultuous Ghost Dance period. These photographs were taken by James Mooney (1861-1921), an anthropologist with the Bureau of American Ethnology. He left Washington in late 1890 to investigate the potentially incendiary Ghost Dance movement. Mooney’s rare portrait of Wovoka is one highlight of the collection. Mooney’s Ghost Dance photographs are of the greatest rarity in the market. We can trace no others having appeared for sale.

$20,000

Civil War carte-de-visite album featuring many signed CDVs. Mathew Brady and others, 1860s

This important Civil War album includes carte-de-visite photographs signed by the following Civil War notables: Winfield Scott (signed on verso), Joseph Hooker, George McClellan, Fitz John Porter, Louis Philippe, comte de Paris, Robert d’Orleans, Duke of Chartres, Robert Anderson, William Seward, Gideon Welles, Simon Cameron, Montgomery Blair.

$18,500

Important Pair of Daguerreotypes: Black Caregiver with White Baby and the Child’s Parents. Talbot County, Maryland or Texas, c. 1853

This striking pair of daguerreotypes evokes the complex relationships between enslaved people and their enslavers in the American South, especially between white families and the trusted women who cared for their children.

the pair: $18,500

Autograph note signed to Robert Watt with original albumen print photograph. No place, July 16, 1874

Mark Twain the humorist. Samuel Clemens sent this delightful humorous note with the accompanying half- length standing portrait of the debonair author.

$18,000

Photo Album Operation Greenhouse. Hollywood, California: United States Air Force Lookout Mt. Laboratory, [1951]

This rare album documents Operation Greenhouse, the first series of tests in the nascent American thermonuclear weapons program. The four tests were performed in April and May 1951 at the Enewetak Atoll of the Marshall Islands. Following the Soviet Union’s successful test of an atomic bomb in August 1949, the United States made the controversial decision to proceed with the development of thermonuclear weapons. These fusion weapons (the “Super” or hydrogen bomb) would be orders of magnitude more destructive than the fission weapons used against Japan.

$17,500

Splendid album containing 50 watercolors, 70 photographs, and fine calligraphic selections of poems and prose. Mostly Possingworth and environs, 1879 - ca. 1905

This magnificent, imposing album was made by a prominent late-Victorian hostess, patron of the arts, and gifted amateur artist. Helen Rose Huth was the wife of the banker Louis Huth. The Huths were major art collectors, and Helen sat for both George Frederic Watts and James Abbott McNeill Whistler who painted the celebrated “Arrangement in Black, No. 2: Portrait of Mrs Louis Huth.”

$16,000