Van Oeyen is my favorite and is essentially the opposite of what we have been discussing here on Paul Thompson and George Grantham Bain. Louis Van Oeyen was a skilled photographer who never outsourced that I am aware of and in fact, the opposite is true in his case. I would venture to guess (just a guess) Van Oeyen himself clicked the shutter on his camera half a million times in his long career. Little of his actual work though is credited as he worked as a staff photographer for the majority of his career and only stamped his own photographs when he was freelancing or during short breaks when he worked for himself. He was a staff photographer at NEA and Acme and his works from that period are uncredited.
I have long told people that early sports photographers that we hold in such high esteem today were not looked at as anything special in their own day. I think this adds to their appeal and mystery, sort of like Van Gogh. In 1915 if you had gone looking for the "great" Charles Conlon, you would have likely found him in the corner on the fifth floor of the Evening Telegram building with many of the other employees not even knowing who he was, but today we talk about him in reverent tones like he was a celebrity. I actually think Conlon's work is pretty average after WWI. He turned from a skilled photographer to the Walmart of baseball photography, with volume being the key as his job was to make money, not art. These guys in general were pretty low paid and were just trying to survive like everyone else. There is no evidence that a sports photographer was paid anything above any other photographer at a newspaper, but this would actually make for a fun research project!
There is often huge gaps in these guys lives we know nothing about, probably because they were broke and had to take jobs on assignment photographing local spelling bees and society events for newspapers and were just one of a sea of photographers with badges on their jackets. Even Carl Horner whose baseball photographs we hold in such high regard, as important as he was, was a classically trained portrait photographer and his images of ballplayers are not significantly better than the stacks of other portraits at any antique show in America. Dont get me wrong, he was good. But nobody would mention the name Carl Horner today had he not lucked into an assignment to take photographs of ballplayers in uniform.
What little we know about these guys is what makes this hobby fun and exciting, but not one early baseball photographer transcended his craft in his own time.
Having said all the above, I love these old guys and their cameras from 100 years ago and the fact we know so little about them is typical of photographers, so much of their work was behind a camera, they RARELY posed on the other side of one!
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