For offer, a nice old photograph archive! Fresh from the photographer's family estate. Vintage, Old, Original, Antique, NOT a Reproduction - Guaranteed !!
William / Bill Whitaker was a professional photographer, and worked for the ANSCO company in Binghamton, New York starting in 1947. Previous to this he lived in Dalton, Massachusetts / Berkshires. 157 photos total. 49 are large format gelatin silver prints mounted on 16 x 20 board. Some are signed Whitaker. Some also have his label on back with other information - some were entered in contests. The first three show the original advertisement the photo was used in, which appeared in various magazines of the time, including Life magazine and others. The remaining photos are 8 x 10, with 8 of them mounted on board. Various subjects : musicians (some from Tanglewood area - including famous cello player Gregor Piatigorsky), medical, children, puppy dogs, cat, actress / actor, oil pipeline construction at sea, baseball, farming, landscape, and much more.
Very nice images of high quality. Ansco produced some of the best paper for film at the time. Overall in good to very good condition. Most photos are very nice. Some have staining to edges of boards. A chance to obtain an wonderful collection that has not been messed with. From the estate in Greene, NY / Binghamton area. Weight of the entire collection is close to 40 pounds. Please see photos. If you collect 20th century Americana history, American advertising photography, fine art, etc. this is a treasure you will not see again! Add this to your image or paper / ephemera collection. 3269
Ansco was the brand name of a photographic company based in Binghamton, New York, which produced photographic films, papers and cameras from the mid-19th century until the 1980s.[1][2]
In the late 1880s, Ansco's predecessor, Anthony and Scovill, bought the Goodwin Camera & Film Company. Hannibal Goodwin invented flexible photographic film, which should have made Anthony and Scovill the leader in the amateur photography business. However, George Eastman copied the patented process and immediately set out to compete against Anthony and Scovill. The ruthless behavior of Eastman nearly drove the now-named Ansco out of
business, but a settlement in 1905 saved the company from bankruptcy. Eastman Kodak got away cheaply in this legal proceeding. In 1928 Agfa of Germany merged with Ansco and allowed it to compete in the worldwide photographic market like its competitors, Kodak and Zeiss. This joint company added many Agfa cameras and accessories to its sales in the USA as a result. In the months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the US Government seized Agfa-Ansco. This now government-run business continued to survive as a hostile alien property (under government control into the 1960s). During this period, the organization was renamed GAF (General Aniline & Film Corporation). Throughout the postwar period the concern sold rebadged versions of cameras made by other manufacturers, including Agfa and Chinon. A Minolta-built Ansco model was the first 35 mm camera in outer space, and their film was used in space, too.
History
Early history
Advertisement for Ansco Speedex Film, 1920.
The company was founded in 1842 (pre-dating Kodak in the photography business) as E. Anthony & Co. (later E. and H. T. Anthony & Company, when Edward Anthony's brother officially joined the business) and became the Anthony & Scovill Co. in 1901, after a merger with the camera business of Scovill Manufacturing (Connecticut), founded by James Mitchell Lamson Scovill and William Henry Scovill. That year the company headquarters relocated to Binghamton, New York. This was already a site of one of Ansco's photographic paper manufacturing facilities. Just after that, in 1905 it settled a landmark patent infringement case against Eastman Kodak, which had been violating the Goodwin flexible film patent (Hannibal Goodwin of Newark, New Jersey) held by Ansco. The settlement received from Eastman Kodak was very small compared to the damage done to Ansco, which already had financial problems as a result of business lost to Eastman Kodak.[3]
Early Ansco Logo on a 120 roll film that expired in 1916
Merger with Agfa
In 1928 Ansco merged with the German photo company Agfa to form a corporation named Agfa-Ansco. Later that year that firm and other German-owned chemical firms were merged into a Swiss holding company, Internationale Gesellschaft für Chemische Unternehmungen AG or IG Chemie, that was controlled by Germany's chemical industry conglomerate, IG Farben. In 1929 the parent corporation's name was changed to American IG Chemical Corporation or American IG, later renamed General Aniline & Film, which continued to produce cameras under the Agfa-Ansco name.[3]
Agfa Ansco 35mm Film (Expired: April 1945)
During the period before the U. S. entrance into World War II, the Agfa-Ansco business grew enormously, with added manufacturing capacity in paper, film and camera manufacturing. The Agfa-Ansco interests in the U. S. and Binghamton factory were taken over by the U. S. government in 1941 due to its ties with Germany.[3] The Ansco company was merged with General Aniline as General Aniline & Film in 1939.
Color film: Anscochrome
Box of 35mm Ansco Super Anscochrome color slide film (Expired: May 1963)
Prior to the war, Agfa-Ansco had marketed Agfacolor film made in Germany. To assist the war effort, the company experts used available information to develop a similar product, first called Ansco Color, later Anscochrome. After the war, Anscochrome was widely distributed, but met with limited commercial success in competition with Kodak products. An important marketing feature was its greater speed in comparison to Kodachrome.[4][5] A second advantage was that users, professional or amateur, could process the film in their own darkrooms rather than having to send it away (as with Kodachrome) or use cumbersome re-exposure steps as with Kodak Ektachrome.
Post-war business
The company was the last business to be sold as enemy assets to American interests in the 1960s. At that time, a new headquarters was constructed in Vestal, New York, adjacent to the new college campus of Harpur College (now Binghamton University). This location the one of two remaining pieces of Ansco in the Binghamton area and is currently occupied by the University. The second production building is located at 16 Emma Street and is currently luxury apartments. The Vestal location continued to do business after World War II as Ansco until 1967 when the company adopted the parent's name of General Aniline & Film (GAF), and a variety of cameras as well as films were sold under this name until the business was shut down in the early 1980s. Briefly in the 1970s, it was the official film of Disneyland and at this time, actor Henry Fonda served as the company's spokesman in television commercials including one that featured Jodie Foster in her first acting role.[6] The last Ansco cameras were produced in the early 1990s by a Hong Kong business that bought the rights to the name.[3]
Binghamton (/ˈbɪŋəmtən/ BING-əm-tən) is a city in the U.S. state of New York, and serves as the county seat of Broome County.[4] Surrounded by rolling hills, it lies in the state's Southern Tier region near the Pennsylvania border, in a bowl-shaped valley at the confluence of the Susquehanna and Chenango Rivers.[5] Binghamton is the principal city and cultural center of the Binghamton metropolitan area (also known as Greater Binghamton, or historically the Triple Cities, including Endicott and Johnson City), home to a quarter million people.[6] The city's population, according to the 2020 census, is 47,969.[7]
From the days of the railroad, Binghamton was a transportation crossroads and a manufacturing center, and has been known at different times for the production of cigars, shoes, and computers.[8] IBM was founded nearby, and the flight simulator was invented in the city, leading to a notable concentration of electronics- and defense-oriented firms. This sustained economic prosperity earned Binghamton the moniker of the Valley of Opportunity.[9] However, starting with job cuts made by defense firms towards the end of the Cold War, the region lost a large part of its manufacturing industry.[10]
Today, while there is a continued concentration of high-tech firms, Binghamton is emerging as a healthcare- and education-focused city, with Binghamton University acting as much of the driving force behind this revitalization.[11]
Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed in many fields of science, manufacturing (e.g., photolithography), and business, as well as its more direct uses for art, film and video production, recreational purposes, hobby, and mass communication.[1]
Typically, a lens is used to focus the light reflected or emitted from objects into a real image on the light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure. With an electronic image sensor, this produces an electrical charge at each pixel, which is electronically processed and stored in a digital image file for subsequent display or processing. The result with photographic emulsion is an invisible latent image, which is later chemically "developed" into a visible image, either negative or positive, depending on the purpose of the photographic material and the method of processing. A negative image on film is traditionally used to photographically create a positive image on a paper base, known as a print, either by using an enlarger or by contact printing.
Commercial photography is probably best defined as any photography for which the photographer is paid for images rather than works of art. In this light, money could be paid for the subject of the photograph or the photograph itself. The commercial photographic world could include:
Advertising photography: There are photographs made to illustrate and usually sell a service or product. These images, such as packshots, are generally done with an advertising agency, design firm or with an in-house corporate design team.