What is it with all these recent photos? Did somebody find a treasure trove of albums. Or is it just one of those coincidences that must, from time to time,. occur?
The publicity surrounding the Peter Schiff photo derives from this article that Simon Garfield published in The Observer’s magazine a fortnight ago. He discusses the circumstances why the story has only come to light now. They’re fairly tragic in their own right.
There is a guy on SA posting some never before seen photos of Hitler. He says they were given to his aunt by Hitlers personal photographer some thirty years ago.
Well, Stef Koorey found an early image of Andrew Borden in the fall, at the same place where she later found the Lizzie photo. She publishes a quarterly online magazine. Andrew graced the cover of November issue of Hatchet and the young Lizzie was featured on the February cover. The publicity over the Lizzie photo coincided with the Hatchet publication. Press releases were issued at the same time and the Fall River Herald News and then the Boston Globe picked up the story.
Don’t know about the other two, but my hometown is also the hometown of a Standard Oil Co. tycoon, Henry H. Rogers, who helped put Helen Keller through college. Her first book is dedicated to him.
Some of those photos look very familiar. A rudimentary search confirms that this one was already known.
Because Heinrich Hoffmann’s archives were seized at the end of the war, his images of Hitler are very widely used and I’d be mildly surprised if many - or any - of these particular photos were previously unknown.
Which isn’t to say that there wouldn’t be a market for them if they were put up for sale - and the people who go for this sort of stuff would lap up the story of Hoffmann personally giving them to the aunt.
Probably coincidence with a splash of public awareness. Yahoo’s article reports that the owner of the Helen Keller photograph has known for years that it was of her (his mother knew Helen as a child), but never thought anyone would be very interested in it. Now that it’s on Yahoo, I wouldn’t be surprised if other old pictures of famous people turn up, owned by people who read on Yahoo that some guy made a bunch of money or publicity off his old picture of Helen Keller.
Even if the finding is serendipitous, just like Straight Dope thread topics, news articles come in waves of popularity. An editor may not have run an old picture of Lizzie Borden six months ago, but if the Helen Keller picture story got hits, the Lizzie picture will be put front and center as well.
I could swear I’ve seen that photo of Keller/Sullivan before. In fact, before I clicked on the link, that was the picture I had in my mind from a book I read about Helen Keller when I was a child. Damn, this is going to bug me forever, since I don’t have access to the book anymore, but I am nearly certain that it was in the children’s biography of Helen Keller that I read during the 80’s. If I recall correctly, it was published by Scholastic. I think the predominant colour of the cover was green and it had the Braille alphabet embossed on the back cover.
Margaret Davidson’s Helen Keller. Its now beige and not green, still has the braille alphabet on the back and is still published by Scholastic. But, while it contains several pictures of Helen and Anne, does not contain that one. I have it in my hands (well, did, I set it down to type) - my daughter and I read it last year. There are two photos in particular - one of Helen and Anne, both wearing black, and one of Helen reading - she is a little older (I recall it being about the time she went to college, although it isn’t captioned as such in the Davidson book) where she is wearing white.
