“Cards are a delightful daydream, photographs are a time machine.”
That short statement found inside longtime collector Jim Chapman’s new book perfectly sums up two popular collecting categories most of us are familiar with. Related on one hand, maybe, but expressly different on the other. While baseball cards of every era have been studied, chronicled and collected for well over 100 years, baseball photography is a much younger passion, one ripe for an extensive roadmap from an experienced guide to help collectors on every level. Chapman’s new book, Baseball Photography of the Deadball Era is Google Maps for the images that brought baseball into the national consciousness.
It’s no lunch time read, nor should it be. Chapman, whose day job is serving as a judge in Texas, set out to take his extensive knowledge, mix in some assistance from some of the hobby’s most avid collectors of deadball era photos and create a book that would both educate collectors and show off some of the coolest photos of big league baseball as it was from about 1900 to 1919.
The result of the effort that began in 2021, is a 391-page tome that’s packed with information laid out in an easily digestible format… and, of course, hundreds of great pictures.
The era produced some of the game’s earliest quality imagery and brought more fame to some photographers than they may have had during their working lives. The black-and-white photos reveal a hardscrabble game of wool socks, flannel uniforms, rugged faces and wooden grandstands. As tough as the game was, advances in photography and publishing helped bring baseball millions of new fans, just as its most famous player, Babe Ruth, was about to bring it to even greater heights.
The photos are fun to look at but collectors always want to know more and Chapman is here to give it to them through a stack of short but information packed chapters.
His effort comes 18 years after the genesis of collector oriented baseball photography books, A Portrait of Baseball Photography, written by Henry Yee, Marshall Fogel and Khyber Oser. The “Type” categorization for photographs we’ve come to know well, was launched with that publication. Yee, a longtime collector, dealer and PSA photo authenticator, wrote the forward for Chapman’s book.
Baseball Photography of the Deadball Era arrives pristine with a dandy dust jacket but auction companies and avid collectors will wear it out. Chapman offers fascinating profiles of some of the top baseball photographers of the time, shedding new light on their work, their styles and their side hustles. We see what Carl Horner, who shot the photo for the T206 Wagner, actually looked like.
But Chapman also goes way beyond names like Horner and Charles Conlon and Louis Van Oeyen to show the many others who captured some of the first widely distributed photos and the cites where they plied their trade. He delves into the workings of the agencies that brought all of that work together and shared it with newspapers and magazines from coast-to-coast and sometimes around the world. He shares a gallery of stampings applied to the backs of photos and offers lessons on how they can be used to date when they were made.
He touches on the dealers who first began offering original vintage photos in the 1990s after years in which those surviving images weren’t much more than a hobby afterthought. He offers a frank assessment of the time when photos began to generate big money at auction and even chronicles some of the first large photograph auctions and also offers a history on how many of the photo collections that have spread across the hobby in the current millennium got there.
There are elements of the book that will, hopefully, change how some of those images are presented, too. George Grantham Bain and Paul Thompson are often described as “well known baseball photographers” credited for photos that bear their names on the back. Chapman outlines how both men were actually the owners of two large photography syndicates that almost certainly put that stamp on the reverse of shots taken by a variety of freelancers and others with whom they worked to serve the needs of their clients. That nugget is a revelation to many who consider themselves avid collectors of baseball photography.
There are many such notes in the book that only dedicated research that goes well beyond the photos themselves would reveal. That work is now done for us and while there is always more to learn, one of the fastest growing segments on the hobby now has a solid foundation and a book that’s a heck of a fun read, even if you’re just a fan of baseball history.
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