Lookit the little tiny life preserver in the water
Ha! Ha! I bet you thought this was an Obamacare metaphor.
Nope. Four generations of the Gibson family from the Islands of Scilly were photographers, and 125 years of their shipwreck pictures are going to auction at Sotheby’s.
THE COMPLETE EXTANT PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE OF SHIPWRECK AND RELATED IMAGES BY FOUR GENERATIONS OF THE GIBSON FAMILY OF PHOTOGRAPHERS, 1872 TO 1997, COMPRISING:
585 glass plate negatives (214: 12 x 10in. and 382: 8 x 6in.) housed in 16 original wooden boxes and one cardboard box, a few plates with cracks, or loss to glass or image, some boxes worn; 407 glass plate copy negatives (6½ by 4¾in.) in 4 cardboard boxes; 179 glass plate negatives (4¼ x 3¼in.); 198 film negatives (5 x 4in.) in three boxes; 335 cut film negatives (various sizes); and 39 (35mm.) film negatives 97 original photographs of shipwrecks (silver prints, 12 x 10in.) manuscript ledger by Alexander and Herbert Gibson on the shipwrecks of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (folio, 330 x 205mm.; approximately 149pp. of notes on wrecks and 32pp. of records of telegraph messages sent from the Isles of Scilly, 1876-77) a collection of books by John Fowles, John Arlott, John Le Carré, and Rex Cowan on the Gibsons of Scilly (see detailed list below), together with newspaper and magazine articles
WANT. Well worth clicking the first link and browsing the photographs. Or this slide show in the Telegraph with larger pictures and longer descriptions.
Oh, but hey…it makes a pretty good Obamacare metaphor, too.
October 23, 2013 — 8:03 pm
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