Capturing Time
Charles Isaacs '73 mines photography's decisive moments.
by Sherri Kimmel
July 1, 2009
Charles Isaacs '73If walls could talk, you would hear Charles Marville whispering in French as he documented the medieval streets of Paris in the 1860s, before Baron Haussmann began his audacious urban renewal of the City of Light. And you would hear the British Francis Frith murmuring as he erected his tripod and aimed his lens toward the Egyptian pyramids in 1858.
Standing in the office-cum-living quarters of Charles Isaacs ’73 is a sense-jangling experience for a visitor. Back and forth in time and place, one’s eyes focus on crisp black and white, dreamy sepia as well as the supersaturated colors of contemporary photographer Jem Southam.
And that’s just the photography in the front room, a saunter away from New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Back up several feet, and you’ll find yourself in the dining room, where a chandelier of Medusa-like blown-glass tendrils draws the eye, until you spy the pre-Columbian bust to the right and, at left, the narrow, wall-length light box containing suspended pre-Ming jade pieces.
This is the abode of a serious collector. But not just a collector. “He’s an international player in photography,” notes Wil Scott ’72, an art historian who heads up adult programs at the National Gallery of Art and is Isaac’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon brother. By “player,” Scott means dealer in fine-art photos—the person who finds just the photo that a museum or a wealthy art patron needs to enhance a collection, usually for five or six figures. There are only about a dozen dealers in the vintage-photo upper echelon that Isaacs occupies.
It’s a career that he began building just after his graduation from Dickinson, where he was a Carlisle-area freelance photographer for The New York Times, Newsweek and The Philadelphia Inquirer and magna cum laude religion major. Though he started out in chemistry, intending to be a physician like his father, Isaacs pivoted away after volunteering at Harrisburg Hospital one summer.
“I was seduced by photography and
didn’t like blood,” the Hummelstown, Pa., native says with a wry smile. He chose religion not because he hankered for clergy
status but because “I was figuring out the meaning of life. Whatever happened at Dickinson made me better able to do what I do well. It did teach me a way of thinking.”
Though he didn’t take a photography class, he got plenty of practice on campus with his sidekick—the now-renowned photojournalist Rick Smolan ’72. For two years after graduation Isaacs and Smolan shared college-photographer duties. In 1977, a personal photo project documenting Southeast Asian refugees who came to Indiantown Gap, Pa., after the fall of Saigon led to a one-person show at Manhattan’s International Center of Photography—and a job with The Philadelphia Inquirer.
As part of the Inquirer’s Three Mile Island coverage team that earned a Pulitzer Prize, Isaacs led the shutter-snapping charge into the damaged nuclear reactor three decades ago.
“If you were willing to work hard, and you were good, you got good assignments,” he says. “It was very exciting, and I was learning how a big city works. I was a suburban kid, and Dickinson, photography and the newspaper are what woke me up.” After a decade at the Inquirer, the last two years of which he spent as photo editor, Isaacs realized, “I was not a serious photographer; I was more into collecting.”
Isaacs began sizing up photos in his early 20s and made his first purchase, Ansel Adams’ Moonrise, for $800 to thank his parents for funding his Dickinson education.
“They liked the idea of collecting photos and had me buy more,” he says. Isaacs, whose specialty is 19th-century French, British and American prints, kicked his collecting up a notch by selling one of his parents’ Adams photos a few year later. With the proceeds he purchased three prints by William Henry Fox Talbot, an Englishman who invented the negative/positive process around 1840.
“Today those Talbots are worth a whole lot more than that Adams,” he says. His parents still own them.
“They indulged me,” he admits. “But you indulge someone, get a good return on the investment, and have a beautiful thing on your wall. What’s not to like?” he says with a smile.
One of the keys to Isaacs’ prominence in the world of high-end photos is his prescience. “Thirty years ago, [collecting photos as you would fine art] was in the air,” he explains. “There were one or two galleries showing vintage photos. All of a sudden, not too many years later, they became much more valuable. I was among the first generation of dealers and curators in photos. Only recently, you need to get a Ph.D. to be a curator.” This is an aim Isaacs’ wife and business partner Carol Nigro achieved this spring when she earned her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Delaware.
The duo’s business, Charles Isaacs Photographs Inc., built its nest egg in 1994, after 15 years of concerted collecting, when the Smithsonian American Art Museum purchased 303 early works by American photographers.
“We used those funds to go to another level,” says Isaacs. “Part of what we did was to buy this apartment”—really two apartments joined in a configuration that showcases their art collection.
Since that first big sale, they dealt collections to the Cleveland Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art. Cleveland bought two-dozen key American photos by the likes of Civil War photographer Timothy O’Sullivan and artist/photographer Thomas Eakins and, later, a major surrealists collection of works by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Dora Maar and others. The National Gallery purchased a major collection of Photo-Secessionists, a movement to recognize photography as an art form led by Alfred Stieglitz, the husband of Georgia O’Keeffe.
In this economic climate, Isaacs finds that museum curators are more deliberative in their purchasing. But the slowing of his usual 80-hour work week has allowed time to pore over the photo books stacked a neat foot high on his coffee table.
The slower schedule also has provided time to reconnect with Dickinson and build a relationship with The Trout Gallery. Early this year funds provided by Wil ’72 and Siena Scott P’02 enabled the gallery to procure an 1885 print by William H. Jackson from Isaacs at a desirable price. The photo arrived on campus for the gallery’s 25th-anniversary celebration in February, which Isaacs attended.
Asked if there is an elusive image beckoning him, Isaacs replies, “There is always a Holy Grail picture—one coming up for sale or one that no one knows about that you have been after for 10 years. But if I’m only after one thing, I get bored.”
Happily, after 30 years in the business, he notes, “There are still discoveries to be made. This has been an amazing voyage of discovery—really, art archaeology, for a lot had been forgotten about early photography. Somehow, a key group of us has managed to stay on top of it all these years.”
To see Charles Isaacs’ photos of Carlisle and the campus from the 1970s, view "Back in the Day."