Michael Lehr Antiques
Live Auction

Fall Photographic History Auction, 2025

Sat, Sep 6, 2025 01:00PM EDT
  2025-09-06 13:00:00 2025-09-06 13:00:00 America/New_York Michael Lehr Michael Lehr : Fall Photographic History Auction, 2025 https://auction.michaellehrantiques.com/auctions/michael-lehr-antiques/fall-photographic-history-auction-2025-20189
We are pleased to announce our next auction, featuring approximately 200 individual lots drawn from a diverse and compelling range of 19th- and early 20th-century photography. This sale focuses on vernacular images, photographs created not as formal studio portraits or elite commissions, but as direct, unscripted records of lived experience. These are objects made by and for everyday people, preserving moments of intimacy, labor, travel, performance, identity, and loss.
Michael Lehr Antiques info@michaellehrantiques.com
Lot 150

Daguerreian Advertising Broadside for Clark Rogers, Rochester, New York

Estimate: $800 - $1,200
Starting Bid
$400

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Rare mid-nineteenth-century broadside advertising the services of daguerreotypist Clark Rogers, offering "Colored Daguerreotype Portraits" and "Colored Daguerreotype Miniatures" to residents of Rochester and the surrounding area. The striking visual layout features a large central woodcut illustration of a finely dressed woman with long hair and a bird perched on her finger, framed by ornate borders and bold typeface announcing Rogers’s specialty in producing hand-tinted photographic portraits.

The text emphasizes Rogers’s technical skill, promising images "not to be surpassed," delivered quickly and affordably. The announcement touts his superior photographic apparatus, long professional experience, and the satisfaction of former patrons. Printed by Canfield & Warren, Book & Job Printers, under the Museum in Rochester, New York, the piece reflects the early commercial promotion of photography as a refined and personalized art form.

Ephemeral photography broadsides from the daguerreian period are exceptionally scarce, especially those referencing the labor-intensive process of hand-coloring images. This example is significant not only for its bold visual appeal but also for its documentation of the expanding photographic trade in upstate New York during the 1840s or early 1850s, when itinerant and local photographers like Rogers competed for clients through such striking promotional materials.

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