Nonprofit Performance 360 Magazine Vol 4 No 4

four other very large collections from private donors. There are some fantastic pieces that were going to get lost because the families were going to throw them away. Older generations love their cameras. They have had them for years and they are like family. They don’t want to turn them over. When they do let go of them, it’s usually through death, and a widow or a child inherits them. That’s when we get them. But the collector should decide before death what he wants to have happen to the collection. The decision also needs to be recorded and the collection needs to be appraised by official appraisers before it can go to a museum. We have a huge beautiful collection that was driven down to us from Connecticut, but it was not appraised beforehand. We can’t find an appraiser. The law won’t let me appraise the items because I am part of the museum. It’s a problem. There are fewer and fewer of us who understand these materials. We don’t want to take things on loan because of the insurance and liability issues. We would love to have cameras and photographic materials given to us, but it’s complicated. I hope the IRS will change some of the laws a little bit. If you want to donate historic cameras or lenses or any artifacts that relate to photography with film, first, I would suggest go to your accountant and ask what to do. Appraise before you ship or do any paperwork. Then, if you want to donate, you already have your artifact appraised, which the IRS requires. Then we will proceed from there. Appraise first. Make sure there is bona fide value.

The Collection and the Background

There is a great deal of historical value and background stories in our collection. For instance, Kodak has no meaning; George Eastman made it up. And the Polaroid Corporation did not invent instant photography; Edwin Land was a chemical engineer, and he created a practical way of making the process work on paper instead of on tintype.

Some old photographs will revert to silver over time. It depends on how they were washed. We have digitized most of our collection of almost 3,000 glass plates.The originals are in a temperature-controlled vault. I handle one glass plate almost every day, and there is no degradation that I can see, unless you scratch it. It’s a wonderful product. It’s almost ideal. That thing is over 100 years old. Normal old pictures from the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s that people have in their drawer turn brown because the chemist or the pharmacist, because that is where most of them were processed, did not understand you had to wash the salts out of the paper to make them last longer. Even today, if you take the old black and white image, put it back in water, and wash it for another ten minutes, it will likely last a lot longer. Just lay it down flat to dry. We have a Graflex combat graphic camera from the Korean War with interchangeable lenses. It was called the Gulliver’s Contax and was used for aerial work. You just wind it up on the bottom and fire. It produced 50 pictures on a roll. It used 70-mm film, which is three to four times larger than 35 mm. It gave a lot bigger resolution, lot better clarity, and real high resolution. The lenses were made by A. Schacht Ulm in Germany. The Nikon F is what most of the press photographers used after the war. This was what you saw at the White House briefing staffs, everywhere, all over the country, and with all the sports photographers. Nikon almost gave away cameras.They did give away cameras to significant press photographers,

Los Angeles Times. This was the camera he used for the images you saw in the newspaper when Ronald Reagan was shot. We have a camera that looks like a big old piece of military junk. But it was the actual camera used at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. It was made by Konica. It took 120-mm film, and it works as perfectly today as the day it was made. Konica AR lenses were wonderful. Konica was really good at manufacturing, but they didn’t quite get their marketing piece together. We have a collection of military Leicas, Leica being the most prestigious of all the cameras. Leica was the only camera allowed in the courtroom for many years because it was so quiet. It had no mirror and no range finder. One of ours is a KE-7A; they made only 550 of these for the US military. It’s brass underneath; it also came with chrome over brass, which was very heavy and substantial. 99.9% of the Leicas that were ever made are worth more used than they were when they were new. It’s an appreciating asset, unlike other items. We have over 100 in our collection. Oskar Barnak, who invented the Leica, had asthma. He couldn’t carry the big plate cameras around, so he built the small camera system. We have one of 100 stereo cameras.They are pretty rare. Somebody was going to throw this thing away. It is absolutely beautiful. It is from 1905. With modern electronic cameras, the body is responsible for about 30% of the total

so they immersed themselves in that market and owned it. We have a nice little camera owned by Bernie Boston. He was a famous White House photographer representing the Washington Star and the

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