George Burke

George Burke and Lou Warneke

Pat Malone, Hack Wilson, Dan Taylor, "Gabby" Hartnett,, ca. 1930

Lou Gehrig, ca 1930

Ray Pepper, ca. 1932

Lefty Gomez

"Honus" Wagner, 1940

Bill Dickey, 1939

Jimmy Fox

Joe Dimagio, 1936

Babe Ruth, 1935

George Burke Biography from Cycleback.com -- The Center for Artifact Studies:

The Chicago photographer was active from the turn of the 20th century through the 1940s. He shot many of the images used to make the 1933-19355 Goudey baseball cards and was an official photographer for the Chicago Cubs, White Sox and NFL’s Bears. Most of his single player photographs on the market were made in the 1930s and have the distinct Goudey-style posed images. His photographs from this era are easy to authenticate. The backs will have his name and 807 Belmont Ave/Chicago address stamped in ink. The backs usually have typed information at the top, typically the player’s name and a cataloging number. They usually measure about 8" x 10” or postcard size and often have silvering. A few of these circa 1930s photos are reprints of earlier images, often made from his own turn of the century negatives or those of others photographers like Charles Conlon. These reprints are often of good quality and, as made in the 1930s, can fetch good prices if depicting someone like Ty Cobb or Walter Johnson.

Burke’s photographs are relatively plentiful and inexpensive compared to those of Charles Conlon. His photographs are of consistently high quality, with sharp focus and lush sepia-tinged tones. Burke is a case where even the collector with an average budget can buy a quality original photograph by a great photographer.

For years after his Burke’s death, his longtime business partner George Brace reprinted Burke photographs. These reprints usually have Brace’s stamp. The reprinted images are typically light in tone, on bright white paper and without the typically lush, sepia tinged tones of Burke’s originals. As Brace himself was a prominent baseball photographer and owned the exclusive rights to Burke’s negatives, these reprints are collectable, just not worth the same as Burke’s originals.

Original 8” x 10” photos shot by George Brace are also on the market, usually of 1950s - 60s baseball players and with his stamp on back. His originals are relatively plentiful but collectable.

Carl (Sometimes Karl) Moon

Carl Moon

Artnet Auction Results

Carl Moon Photography

Cowan's Auctions

Libary of Congress

Luminous Lint

"Navajo Boy", 1907

"Navajo Maid"

"Haz-Pah, Navajo Maid"

"The Wolf (Ma-Itso)", 1904

"Chick-A-Ponaqie Havasupa (Billy Burro)"

"Vicente, Chief of Navajos", 1905



"Corn Song", 1907



"Sandomingo Peddler", c. 1906

"Peace Pipe"

"Little Maid of the Desert", 1904

"Loti, Laguna Pueblo"

"Chief Gray Hawk, Taos", c. 1910

Biograpy from "Best of the West 2012:  Carl Moon, Photographer with a Native Heart" by Dana Joseph for "Cowboys & Indians, the Premier Magazine of the West":


The face of the handsome youth in the famous Navajo Boy (see "Navajo Boy" photograph above) image is familiar. The photographer who immortalized him in Western culture is not.

Born in 1879 in Wilmington, Ohio, Carl (originally Karl) Everton Moon loved reading stories about Native Americans as a boy. He followed his Western aspirations to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he set up a studio in 1904 and began photographing, painting, and traveling among Pueblo tribe members he befriended.

“Photographing the American Indian in his natural state was the principal aim of Carl Moon,” wrote Tom Driebe, author of In Search of the Wild Indian: Photographs & Life Works by Carl and Grace Moon. “He tried to show the Indian as he lived before civilization hampered his freedom ... and changed his picturesque customs and mode of dress.” Moon knew he was working against the clock of forced acculturation. “About the only thing we have thus far overlooked taking from the Indian,” he wrote, “is his right to perform his religious rites with their accompanying dances in his own way.”

In 1907 Moon moved to Arizona and for seven years gathered paintings and photographs for the Fred Harvey Company at the Grand Canyon; there, he also served as the official photographer for the Santa Fe Railroad and studied painting with visiting artists, including Thomas Moran, Louis Akin, and Frank Sauerwein. Moon married artist Grace Purdie in 1911, and the two traveled the Southwest documenting Native culture. In 1914, the couple settled in Pasadena, California, and embarked on a series of 22 illustrated children’s books about American Indians.

In 1923, Moon approached railroad magnate and art collector Henry E. Huntington with the proposition of selling 300 photographic prints and 24 oil paintings, “an addition that Moon felt would ‘give the student of the future the true coloring of the Indian and his surroundings,’ ” says Jennifer A. Watts, curator of photographs at The Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Moon died in 1948 in San Francisco; his art lives on at The Huntington, where the collection is being arranged, described, and digitized. “The Moon photographs are not only an important visual resource for scholars and students of tribal peoples at the turn of the 20th century,” Watts says, “but sensitive, beautifully rendered portraits that reveal the artist’s deep admiration for the peoples he photographed.”

I am most grateful to "Cowboys & Indians" magazine for their generous permission
allowing me to reproduce Dana Joseph's article on my blog.  The magazine sponsores

an annual photography contest.  Click here to see last year's winners.

Alan Cohen

Alan Cohen portrait by Jordan Schulman, 2006

The Photographs of Alan Cohen

IMPROBABLE BOUNDARIES:  Improbable Boundaries document the natural, imposed, geologic, or treaty lines that divide forces, actions, places one from the other. Sites within this series include the equator, various prime meridians, continental divides or contiguous land areas created by treaty, war or nature.

"Improbable Boundaries, Continental
Divide", 2004

"Improbable Boundaries, Equator", 1999

"Improbable Boundaries, Holy Roman Empire", 2005

LINES OF AUTHORITY:  Lines of Authority are images that straddle the absolute borders dividing two legal entities—the treaty or geographic demarcations between institutions, states, and nations.

"Lines of Authority, Belgium/
Netherlands", 2010

"Lines of Authority, Gila River Reservation/
United States", 2004

NOW:  NOW pictures lift known cataclysmic events into the present. Through the documentation of contemporary ground the viewer is moved to ground zeros, killing and burial sites and the paths of cruel barriers now dissolved.

"NOW, Marathon to Olympia -- First Finish Line,
Greece", 2006

"NOW, Berlin Wall", 2005

"NOW, Guernica, Spain", 2003

"NOW, Nazi Death Camp, KZL --
Auschwitz, Poland", 1994

MILITARY ARCHEOLOGY:  Military Archeology documents the specialized and period architecture of the fortress itself, its gun emplacements, its ramparts, the fortified bunkers and the ordinance storage facilities.

"Military Archeology, Hao Lo Prison, 'Hanoi Hilton',
Vietnam", 2010



"Military Archeology, Dover Cliff Fortifications
from Napoleon Era, Dover, England", 2003



"Military Archeology, Site of Last Publid Guillotining,
Paris, France", 2010

IN SITU:  In Situ records places of legend - The Dead Sea, Death Valley, meteor impact sites, glacial areas and the volcanized earth of the United States and Hawaii the Caribbean, and Mexico. This series also includes ground made special by art - Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, and Tony Smith's sculpture at the base of the World Trade Center.

"In Situ, Galapagos", 1999

"In Situ, Death Valley, California", 2002

CONSTRUCTIONS:  Constructions are the abstracted endpoints of mirrors, plexiglass and prosaic materials injected into the perspective views of quarries, construction sites and public places.

"Construction 2-05", 1990

"Construction 147-04",1989

"Construction 27-02", 1990

I am most grateful to Mr. Cohen for his generous permission allowing me to
feature his work here on my blog; and to Jordan Schulman, as well, for

his kind permission to reproduce his portrair of Mr. Cohen here.

Biography from Alan Cohen's web site:

Alan Cohen grew up in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. After earning a degree in nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University and beginning a doctoral program in thermodynamics at Northwestern University, he began photographing and eventually left the sciences to study photography. As a graduate student at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design, he studied with Aaron Siskind, Arthur Siegel, Garry Winogrand, Charles Swedlund, Ken Josephson, and Joe Jachna. He was awarded a M.Sc. Photography degree in 1972.

Married to Susan Walsh, Cohen lives in Chicago and is an Adjunct Full Professor in the Art History, Theory, Criticism Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a member ofthe visiting faculty at Columbia College Chicago's Department Of Photography.

Arthur Leipzig

Arthur Leipzig portrait by Roger Gordy

Arthur Leipzig, Photographer

Brooklyn Museum Collection

Hackelbury Gallery Portfolio

Jackson Fine Art Gallery Portfolio

Luminous Lint Collection

Soulcatcher Studio Portfolio

"Brooklyn Bridge," 1946

"Turning Barrel," 1952

"Chalk Games," 1950

"King of the Hill," 1943

"Divers, East River," 1948

"Ideal Laundry," 1946

"Rain," 1945

"Subway Sleepers," 1950

"Tammany Haall," 1947

"Sleeping Child," 1950

"Clinic, Mexico," 1959

"Hebrew Class, Behker, Ethiopia," 1979

I am most grateful to Mr. Leipzig for his kind permission allowing me to
feature his work here on my blog.

Biography from Arthur Leipzig, Photographer:

Arthur Leipzig was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1918. After studying photography at the Photo League in 1942, he became a staff photographer for the Newspaper PM, where he worked for the next four years. During this period, he completed his first photo essay, on children's street games. In 1946, he left PM. After a short stint at International News Photos, he became a freelance photojournalist, traveling on assignments around the world, contributing work to such periodicals as The Sunday New York Times, This Week, Fortune, Look, and Parade. Edward Steichen encouraged him to teach, which he did for twenty-eight years at Long Island University, where he is now Professor Emeritus.

Leipzig has been included in many museum group exhibitions, most notably "New Faces" (1946) and Edward Steichen's landmark "Family of Man" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Photography as a Fine Art" in 1961 and 1962. His one-man exhibitions include "Arthur Leipzig: a World View" at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in 1998, "Growing Up in New York" at the Museum of the City of New York in 1996, "Jewish Life Around the World" at the Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, "Arthur Leipzig's People" at the Frumkin Adams Gallery, "Arthur Leipzig's New York" at Photofind Gallery, and retrospectives at The Hillwood Museum and The Nassau County Museum of Fine Art. His work is also represented in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, The Jewish Museum, and The Bibliothèque Nationale, among others.

Arthur Leipzig has received the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art Photography, the National Urban League Photography Award, several annual Art Directors Awards, and two Long Island University Trustees Awards for Scholarly Achievement. He lives on Long Island.



Introduction to "Growing Up in New York" by Arthur Leipzig:

I came to photography quite by accident. I had no idea what I wanted to be when I was growing up, in a middle-class family living in a middle-class section of Brooklyn. I used to go to the library to read about occupations. I started with the A's Agriculture, Archaeology, Architecture - but never made it as far as the P's. When I was 17, I left school and worked at an assortment of jobs - truck driver, salesman, office manager, assembly line worker. Finally, I worked in a wholesale glass plant, where I seriously injured my right hand and lost the use of it for fourteen months. I began to search for a way to make a living. A friend suggested that if I studied photography at the Photo League, I might be able to get a job as a darkroom technician. I registered for a beginning class at the League. Two weeks later I knew that photography would be my life's work.

My life as a photographer began in the streets of the city. For me, New York, with its diverse cultures and varied topography, presented a new challenge every day. My days were spent shooting with my 9 x 12cm Zeiss Ikon camera; my nights in the darkroom and in discussion with other students and photographers. I was obsessed. It was in New York that I honed my skills and began to learn about the world and about myself.

In 1943, while working on The Newspaper PM, I shot my first major photo essay, "Children's Games." The streets were an extension of the home. They were the living rooms and the playgrounds, particularly for the poor whose crowded tenements left little room for play. The children occupied the streets, now and then allowing a car or truck to pass.

Over the years, I have worked as staff and freelance photographer for a wide variety of publications. My assignments and my independent projects took me all over and under the city, always searching for the human face of New York. I photographed people on the subways and on the beach in Coney Island, painters working on the Brooklyn Bridge, kids swimming in the East River; I photographed the night life and the violence, the working class and the upper class. In those days I traveled all around the city at any time of night or day, and except for rare instances I seldom felt in danger. The city was my home. As I look back at the work that I did during that period I realize that I was witness to a time that no longer exists, a more innocent time.

While I know that the city has changed, that the streets are dirtier and meaner, the energy that I love is still there. No matter where I go, I keep coming back to photograph New York. Of course the "good old days" were not all sweetness and light. There was poverty, racism, corruption, and violence in those days, too, but somehow we believed in the possible. We believed in hope.