TRADITIONAL HOME ARTICLE
"Snapping Up the Past"
By Andrew Decker
New Yorker Daile Kaplan was scouting an antiques mall in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, in 1991 when she spotted a round plate-sized photograph of a long-lashed woman peering from beheath a veil. The black-and-white head shot was mounted on cardboard and being used to display black-beaded hat veils. The owner of the shop had stretched several vintage veils over the photograph. The combination of the real veils and the cardboard cutie had the charm of something that had once been sophisticated and elegant but, through age and changes in fashion, had become a wonderful expression of a bygone era.
The shop owner was selling the piece for $10. "Can you do any better?" Kaplan asked. "The veil alone is worth $10" countered the dealer. Without deciding what she was oing to do with an old-fashioned advertising display, Kaplan put down her money—and launched herself on a career as keeper of other people’s memories, crafts, and artifacts.
Today, Kaplan’s sun-drenched loft, which looks over the canyons of New York’s SoHo, is crowded with pillows, boxes, porcelain, jewelry, table lamps, and decks of cards that date back 100 years. The common thread to her collection is photography; each object contains a photographer in some form.
Kaplan knows more about fine-art photography than most shutterbugs. Author of L:ewis Hine in Europe, The "Lost" Photographs (Abbeville Press), she appraises photography on Antiques Roadshow and is the director of photographs at Swann Galleries, a New York auction house. She spends her days in the company of images by Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, the legendary Alfred Stieglitz, Mexican genius Tina Modotti, and celebrity shooter Annie Leibovitz—photographs that cost tens of thousands of dollars and hang in museums.
So naturally, Kaplan has an eye for rare
daguerreotypes and art photos, but she also has a heart for the homely
and the homemade. "My photo objects are soulful," she says.
"They may not be the most beautiful and polished things, but they’re
made by people doing something they care about, or adding personal touches,
or images to wonderful things. It’s easy to look as these objects
as amateurish, but there’s something so genuine about them."
A Lincoln memorial pin, for example, has a tiny bust-length tintype of
the president attached to mesh ribbons that were once red, white and blue,
although the red has turned into a murky peach, revealing its age. Then
there's the cardbox box dressed up in ecru moire paper that has on its
lid a daguerreotype of an engraving of the Duke of Wellington. Initially,
Kaplan thought it might be box to store christening gifts (engraved gold
teeting rings and silver spoons). But its size, and an interior divided
into three compartments, suggest a man's glove or jewelry box dating from
the Edwardian era, when men were proud to own elegant and beautifully
handcrafted objects.
Most of the objects in Kaplan's collection are labors of love. For instance, there is nothing mass-produced about the Wellington box, with its frieze of scrolling brass foliage wandering across the cover.
Kaplan has learned from her collection. The objects she’s found that were created in Europe and even South America are more for an upscale clientele. There’s a lovely pink chocolate pot with a girl’s image in the gold-encircled medallion. The shape is a 19th-century neoclassical turn of wonderful proportions made unique by the image of the young girl. While not opulent by the standards of Louis XVI, it’s a beautiful, finely crafted object that once belonged to a wealthy family.
American objects are often more homespun. Some are quite astonishing, such as a handcrafted lamp with an oak base and an iron hand-forged shade. The shade is a series of frames into which its creator set lantern slides. "It’s like somebody’s winter project in Maine!" enthuses Kaplan. Other items, like a tiny filigree coach with man’s cameo-sized portrait on the top, are more finely wrought.
Kaplan’s collection is electric, to say the least. She has a slew of lamps with images across their shades. The early ones, from the 1940s and ‘50s, were made to sit on top of the once-hug wood cases that surrounded early televisions. A Hills Brothers coffee can from the ‘60s is decorated with a wraparound image of Yosemite National Park as photographed by Ansel Adams. There are also cherry-red coasters with photo images of Marilyn Monroe and pillows with black-and-white photographs transferred onto fabric.
But Kaplan’s heart may be closest to a keepsake box of inlaid wood in a beautifully textured series of designs—sun, stars, crosses, diamond lozenges, and curvilinear borders. Inside the lid is a mirror surrounded by daguerreotypes and tintypes showing a girl’s progression from young adulthood to marriage.
There wasn’t an easy way for Kaplan to describe a collection that encompasses so much—folk art, crafts, furniture, jewelry, and photography—until she coined the term "pop photographica." Over the course of 10 years, she has pioneered a collecting genre that was, and remains, remarkably affordable. The hat viel display cost just $10, the handkerchief purse around $50, the chocolate pot and Victorian wedding altar around $100. But she’s no longer the only player in the field. A curator at a major museum in New York has followed suit, and Kaplan herself is curating a show at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Taking a tour of Kaplan’s collection—on shelves and tops of desks and tables and in display cases—is like walking through a panorama of hundreds of lives. The images, and the objects that envelope and display them, are testaments to the lives of a broad range of people over the span of the past century and ah half. They commemorate defining moments from an era when snapshots were not considered disposable.
"It’s all fascinating," Kaplan says. "It’s a pleasure to see how photographs were used in their time. But they also stir feelings of grace, longing, and memory."