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(New here? Read Part 1 and Part 2 first!)

Last weekend, the Portland Art Museum opened a new exhibition titled “Riches of a City: Portland Collects” The museum curators worked with local collectors to create an accessible and diverse showcase — over two hundred pieces from eighty private collections, many of which are instantly recognizable.

Of course, I have to admit some bias: my Frederick H. Evans print of “A Sea of Steps” is one of the 24 photos scattered through out the exhibit. It’s hanging along with some of my all time personal favorite photographs, including what I consider the pinnacle of fashion photography: Richard Avedon’s “Dovima with Elephants.” There are a couple of Ansel Adams prints — the “Winter Sunrise” at Lone Pine, and his portrait of Georgia O’Keefe and Orville Cox. There are photos from Sally Mann and Robert Mapplethorpe. Fantastic stuff, and very well placed along side the Picasso’s, the Dutch, the Warhols, the giant French theater lithographs, the Tiffany silver, and the hundreds of others …

It is a wonderful exhibition.

It has also clarified my decision of what to do with the Evans photograph: Donate? Sell? Lend? Keep?

I’ve watched a hundred people experience the same thing I felt when I saw it for the first time: the initial glance, the pause, the step forward for a closer look. The smile. Seeing this over and over again on the opening night, and on subsequent visits to the museum, has thoroughly convinced me that this photograph is something that needs to be shared.

Furthermore, it doesn’t feel right profiting from a family keepsake. My grandfather and grandmother were artists; they felt a deep connection with art, taught others to appreciate and create, and believed in supporting the institutions that give the rest of us access to the world’s masterpieces.

Giving the photograph to the Portland Art Museum, where it can be appreciated by so many more people, and where my grandparents’ names are permanently attached to the piece in tribute … well, it’s just the right thing to do. For the piece. For my family. For Portland and lovers of photography.

But the obvious question still remains: how much is it actually worth?

A few evenings ago I sat in a comfortable chair at a nice bar and found out.

As it turns out, appraising art is fairly intense. Jennifer Stoots, my art appraiser, walked me through the process …

Fundamentally, art isn’t worth anything (monetarily) unless someone buys it. There is no mystical value attached to art for the sake of it being art — the value of a piece is determined just like anything else that is bought or sold. If you’re an aspiring artist and you’re curious how much your paintings are worth, the answer is simple: how much did you sell them for?

Pretty straight forward. Laissez faire economists would be proud.

Of course, this raises the question … how do you put a value on a piece that isn’t being sold? More specifically, how do you justify the value of a piece to an insurance company, or the IRS?

That answer requires a bit more footwork and research. The goal is to justify a price that someone would most likely pay for the piece in the current art market. Over the course of a month and a half, Jennifer researched historical sales at auction of similar pieces. Then, she consulted with several experts who have a track record of buying and selling similar pieces — prominent art dealers who specialize in late 19th Century and early 20th Century photographs. Finally, Jennifer examined the range of values she had collected from the various sources, and decides on a single figure that is a justifiable and reasonable “fair market value” for a donation.

This process resulted in a sixteen page booklet describing the appraisal process, the people, the history, the significance of the piece, and research notes: enough material to satisfy any serious inquiry into the value of the photograph.

Pretty cool.

What’s even cooler? Finding out my gift to the museum, for purposes of a charitable donation, is worth $31,750.

I’m thrilled — and I’d love to share it with you.

If you’re interested in seeing the photograph, it will be on display at the Portland Art Museum until May 22nd — and if you send me an e-mail, I’ll be happy to meet you there and share what I’ve learned over the last few months.

Here we are:

… and here’s a much better picture of the actual print:

Cheers!

(New here? Read Part 1 first!)

I have a couple bits of news, and I’d like to give you a more detailed tour of the print. I’m still ruminating on the fate of the photograph, but there’s plenty to do in the meantime …

First, I have a date with an appraiser to do the first detailed examination of the print. I’ll be sharing that process as it unfolds, in early January.

Second, the piece will soon be on display at the Portland Art Museum, as part of the “Riches of a City” exhibition, running from February through May of 2011.

Now, on to the main course. The picture below was taken in a bright examination room, so my apologies for the reflections. I’ll be posting better photos after the initial appraisal inspection!

This is a picture of my copy of Frederick Evans’ “A Sea of Steps.”

What you see here is the photograph, mounted on card stock, behind glass. You can’t see the frame, but you can see my finger down there in the lower left. Hah.

The subject of Evans’ photograph is a stairwell at Wells Cathedral in Somerset, England. More specifically, this is the intersection of two flights of stairs: the door at the top of the stairwell leads to the Vicar’s Close (where the residents of the cathedral live), and the “swell” on the right hand side leads to the Chapter House (the official meeting room).

What makes this image significant is its role in helping establish photography as an art in its own right. Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, photography was a very popular curiosity. Many photographers attempted to reconcile photography with the fine arts by way of elaborate manipulations to make it a human endeavor, not just a mechanical and chemical process. Evans rejected that idea, and sought to create purely photographic images that were beautiful, representational, and undeniably fine art.

His process was painstaking. He would camp out for weeks in a location to find the perfect perspective on his subject, the perfect time of day, and perfect exposure for his film. No artificial illumination, no Photoshop, no creative cropping, and no intervention. What you see in this photograph is what he saw in that stairwell, in that moment.

This image is considered by many to be his finest; the culmination of his technical skill and artistic vision.

The negative for this image was created in 1903, and this print was made sometime before 1915. The first world war effectively ended Evans’ career in photography when platinotype (platinum) photography became prohibitively expensive.

Fast forward about one hundred years, and here it is.

The card stock it’s mounted on bears the faint remains of his hand drawn borders. The “empty” space underneath the photo contains the imprint of his name, the title of the piece, and his blind stamp — basically an un-inked stamp of his initials, pressed into the paper.

The print is a bit smaller than the original negative, at about 9.5 x 7.5 inches. That’s a big sheet of film: more than two thousand times larger than the sensor in the digital camera used to capture the image above. To make the print, Evans placed the negative directly on top of the paper, and turned on a light for a few seconds to expose it — simple, eh?

We can tell the paper uses a silver emulsion because of the way it has faded over the last century. The fading is most evident in the lower corners of the photo, which appear gray. It’s actually silver when you see it in person, and reflects the light from the room.

The fading has also revealed retouched areas within the photograph, because the retouching pigments fade at a different rate than the emulsion. If you look at the top edge of the photo, towards the left, you’ll see some dark boxes that stand out from the rest of the image. Evans is known to have “spotted” his images (to remove dust marks and such), and to have enhanced some window tracery, but these boxes are pretty dramatic.

The photograph appears to be adhered to the card stock at the corners, rather than a full contact mount, which has caused the edges to curl up a bit. It’s hard to see in the photo above, but the evidence is in a slight shadow underneath the bottom edge. In it’s current frame, the curled edges are touching the glass — this is something they’ll be fixing in the conservation process, probably by inserting shims into the frame to increase the distance between the glass and the photo.

So there it is.

I’ll post more news as it comes.

(on to Part 3!)