Jason’s Notebook: I Wanted It to Be Real
By Jason R. Roske
What a collection of 19th-century photographs taught me about excitement, expertise, and knowing when to question your own conclusions.
A few weeks ago, I drove to Wichita, Kansas to look at a collection of early American photography and antiques.
I had already spent quite a bit of time talking with the owners about what they had. They had sent several emails and dozens of photographs. We spoke on the phone, and they were excited that I was coming down to see them. I was excited to see them too.
Maybe a little too excited.
They had been collecting for more than 50 years, buying and selling along the way, and their collection included daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, identified family photographs, and what appeared to be a substantial group of Civil War-era military portraits.
When I arrived, much of what I saw reinforced that excitement. These weren’t boxes filled with obvious reproductions. There were genuinely old photographs in genuinely old cases, with period mats, clothing, hairstyles, and photographic processes. Most of the collection appeared to be exactly what it was represented to be.
Mixed among all of that were dozens of images that appeared to depict Civil War soldiers and officers.
They looked right. They looked real.
More importantly, surrounded by everything else, they felt right. Any concerns I might have had were answered internally as being overly pessimistic.
And I wanted them to be right. I wanted them to be real.
An Exciting Collection Gets Even More Exciting
We brought the collection back to Kansas City and began preparing it for auction.
Before the auction was even published, I put the photographs into our showcases and shot a quick video of the collection. The response was immediate. Thousands of people watched it. Collectors commented, shared the video, and began asking about the auction.
When the auction was published on Friday afternoon, the response became even stronger. Dealers and serious collectors of early photography from across the country were looking at the catalog, watching lots, registering for the auction, bidding, and contacting us.
Everything seemed to confirm what I already believed we had.
Then some of those collectors started asking questions and raising concerns.
First one person, and then another, pointed out details on certain military photographs that concerned them.
My first thought was Facebook.
Anyone who spends time there knows that almost anything posted online will eventually attract someone declaring it fake, often with considerably more confidence than evidence. So my first instinct wasn’t necessarily to accept the criticism.
This quickly went beyond that.
I recognized one of the critics as a well-known and respected collector and dealer of American Civil War material. He didn’t simply claim that several of the images in the auction had been embellished. He sent me photographs showing another antique image before and after it had received similar treatment.
That before-and-after comparison was crucial. It gave credibility to the criticism, but more importantly, it showed me what I needed to look for.
So, I went back to the office on Saturday and looked again.
This time, I looked differently.
I let the skepticism that should have been present from the beginning take center stage and really looked at what was there.
What Was I Actually Seeing?
Once I began comparing the military images closely, patterns started appearing.
Gold or yellow buttons. Shoulder boards and straps. Piping on uniforms. Insignia. Weapons. Other details that made the people in these photographs appear to be soldiers or officers.
The photographs themselves were old. So were the cases and mats. But on these images, the military details weren’t simply highlighting features captured in the underlying photographs. They created military attributes that weren’t there.
Once I saw it in one photograph, I began seeing it in another. And another.
Eventually, I identified 37 photographs that are genuine mid-19th-century images that were later altered/embellished to make the sitters appear military.
That represented roughly 40% of the photographs in this collection, nearly 90% of the images we had understood to be military subjects, and about 20% of the collection overall.
Unfortunately, those were also the photographs generating the most interest.
After this discovery I removed the auction from public view and ultimately decided to cancel it. The unaffected material will be reconsidered individually and, where appropriate, offered as part of a future Antiques & Decorative Arts Auction.
The 37 photographs are a story of their own, and I am documenting them separately. There is a lot that collectors can learn from seeing them together. But that isn’t the story I want to tell here.
The question I’ve been thinking about ever since is much more uncomfortable:
Why didn’t I see it sooner?
I Wanted My Instinct to Be Right
I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years, and I’ve handled tens of thousands of objects. Part of this business is developing an instinct for when something deserves more attention.
But experience can create its own problems.
I had invested time talking and emailing with these clients before going to Wichita. I drove several hours, spent a night in a hotel, and devoted the better part of a day to examining the collection.
By the time I was standing in their home, I wanted the trip to be worthwhile. I wanted the collection to be good. I wanted my instinct about it to be correct. I wanted to believe my clients.
And I wanted it to be real.
There is another important part of this story. These weren’t people who told me they had assembled a collection last year from questionable online sellers. They told me they had been collecting for more than 50 years. When we subsequently discussed what we had discovered, they told me they did not know the photographs had been altered and believed they had been taken advantage of themselves.
I have no evidence telling me who altered these photographs, when they were altered, or where they entered the collecting marketplace. I’m not going to speculate about any of those things.
But a collection assembled over 50 years carries a certain psychological weight.
Collectors make mistakes. No one knows everything when they start collecting. You expect optimistic attributions. We all want to find a diamond in the rough when we’re out hunting for treasures. You expect family stories that have changed over time.
You don’t necessarily expect dozens of genuine 19th-century photographs that have been deliberately changed to tell a different story.
Maybe I should have.
The Rest of the Collection Helped Tell the Lie
This may be the most important thing I’ve realized.
If someone had put those 37 photographs on a table by themselves and asked me to examine them, I hope my reaction would have been different.
But that’s not how I encountered them.
They were mixed into a much larger collection, and most of that collection was right. There are unquestionably authentic images of soldiers in this collection.
That context mattered.
Every genuine daguerreotype made the next photograph easier to accept. Every correct case, mat, period hairstyle, ordinary civilian portrait, and legitimate military image reinforced the collection around it.
I allowed the collection to give credibility to the individual objects, when the individual objects should have been giving credibility to the collection.
That’s an important distinction.
Even the altered photographs themselves were mostly genuine.
Someone didn’t need to manufacture a fake 160-year-old photograph. The photograph was already 160 years old.
They only needed to change the story.
A few painted buttons. A shoulder strap. Some piping. An insignia. Perhaps a weapon.
Physically, the alteration might represent only a small percentage of the object. Historically and financially, it changes everything.
That realization led me to another article I’m working on, and probably the best description I’ve found for this particular kind of deception:
The most dangerous fake may be the one that’s 95% real.
Experts Get Excited, Too
There’s a tendency to think expertise works like a switch. An expert knows. A novice doesn’t.
Twenty years as an auctioneer, 35 years buying and selling antiques, and nearly 50 years as a collector have taught me that it doesn’t work that way.
Experience gives you a larger library of things you’ve seen before. It teaches you what questions to ask. It helps you recognize patterns and inconsistencies. It doesn’t make you infallible. In fact, experience can create another problem.
We begin believing our own press.
I am the expert. I am the one people search out to confirm what they need to know. I am the person they trust to offer great things.
Of course I’m right about this too.
That’s an uncomfortable thing to write, but I think it’s important.
Expertise doesn’t eliminate expectations or enthusiasm. Sometimes it may make those reactions stronger because experience tells us just how exciting a discovery could be.
I’ve experienced that feeling plenty of times.
This time, I let it get ahead of my skepticism.
I Was Asking the Wrong Question
Looking back, I think I can identify the mistake more precisely.
I was essentially asking:
Does this look like a Civil War military photograph?
- Old photograph? Yes.
- Correct photographic process? Yes.
- Period clothing and hairstyle? Yes.
- Old case and mat? Yes.
- Military buttons? Yes.
- Shoulder straps? Yes.
Everything seemed to accumulate toward the conclusion I had already reached.
But that wasn’t the question I needed to ask.
I needed to ask:
What evidence in the underlying photograph demonstrates that this is a military photograph?
That’s a very different question.
One of the skills that experience gives us is pattern recognition. We see a combination of familiar details and quickly understand what we’re probably looking at. Most of the time, that’s enormously useful. But pattern recognition can become pattern completion. Once enough pieces seemed to fit, I began filling in the rest of the picture instead of continuing to test it. I didn’t need to become less imaginative or less excited about what I was seeing. I needed to make the evidence catch up with the story I was already telling myself.
Instead of looking for confirmation, I needed to start over.
- Are those actually buttons captured by the camera, or dots of paint sitting on top of the image?
- Is that shoulder board visible in the photographic information, or has someone created it?
- Is the coloring emphasizing something that was already there, as was commonly done in the 19th century, or is it inventing a detail that never existed?
Once I started asking those questions, some of these photographs became much harder to believe.
Once I started noticing the issues, they became impossible not to see.
Sometimes You Need Someone Else to Make You Look Again
There’s another lesson here that shouldn’t get lost. We didn’t discover the problem because I suddenly had a flash of brilliance. Collectors who knew this material contacted us and raised concerns.
That’s one of the reasons relationships with serious collectors, dealers, scholars, museums, and specialists matter so much in this business. Nobody knows everything.
When someone who has spent decades studying a narrow field tells me, “You might want to look at this again,” the correct response isn’t to defend the catalog description.
It’s to look again. And I did.
They were right to raise the questions, and I’m thankful that they did.
Those questions saved us from selling 37 inaccurately described photographs, having to unwind those purchases after the fact, and potentially damaging a reputation we’ve spent decades building.
More importantly, they saved our customers from buying something that wasn’t what we represented it to be.
And by forcing us to examine and document these photographs now, those questions will help collectors we will never meet. These images will almost certainly return to the marketplace someday. When they do, there will now be a public record of what we found.
The auction was stopped because what we learned changed our understanding of what we were selling.
That’s how the process is supposed to work.
This reminds me of an article I wrote before about why the provenance of the seller can matter nearly as much as the provenance of the object. This experience reminded me that responsibility works both ways.
What Happens Now?
This experience will change how I look at collections forever.
A good collection provides context, but context can’t be allowed to become evidence. The fact that 100 things around an object are right doesn’t make the 101st thing right. That doesn’t mean every object requires the same level of investigation. It means that when an object’s value, history, or importance depends upon a particular claim, that claim needs to stand on its own.
Trust is not evidence.
Provenance from a respected collection can be meaningful, but it isn’t proof. Context can tell us where to look and what questions to ask, but ultimately the object still has to support the story we’re telling about it. That applies far beyond early photography. It applies to paintings, signatures, coins, furniture, pottery, jewelry, historical artifacts, and nearly everything else we handle.
The collection can provide the context.
The object still has to provide the evidence.
The Hardest Conclusion to Question May Be Your Own
I’m glad the collectors contacted us. I’m thankful that we stopped the auction. And I’m grateful that these photographs didn’t make their way through our auction and into someone else’s collection under descriptions we could no longer support.
But that’s not the part of this experience I find most valuable.
I’ve spent more time thinking about why I accepted the photographs initially than congratulating myself for eventually figuring out what was wrong.
I wanted them to be real.
The collection was exciting. Most of it was right. The clients had collected for decades. The photographs were genuinely old. Other people became excited when they saw them.
Every one of those things made the next assumption easier.
Wanting these photographs to be real wasn’t the mistake. Getting excited about an interesting collection wasn’t the mistake either. That’s one of the things I still love about this business.
The mistake was allowing what I wanted to be true to influence how carefully I tested whether it was true.
Expertise matters. Experience matters. Research matters.
But skepticism matters, too.
Sometimes the moment when you’re most excited about what you’ve found is precisely the moment when you need to ask yourself the hardest question:
What if I’m wrong?
That’s one question I hope I never become too experienced to ask.
Jason R. Roske
