Quote:
Originally Posted by mikejanesphotography
Maybe someone knows the answer here, but with negatives from Charles Conlon, how did they end up on the market? I know from when John Rodgers bought the collection from The Sporting News and they were recently re-sold hundreds of them came up missing, are the ones out there the missing ones? If that's the case, was Rodgers legally allowed to sell them to begin with? Same with Brace/Burke, apparently Rodgers sold them off violating the agreement, so were those negatives on the market before Rodgers did that? He's being sued for selling them and missing payments, along with dozens of other things!
Just goes to show the damage one guy can do...
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With regard to the Burke/Brace archives, Rogers struck a deal with Mary Brace, George Brace's daughter, to purchase the archive for an up-front lump-sum payment (sort of a down-payment) plus periodic payments to follow. Per the deal, he had the ability to sell the original negatives before all of the payments had been made. I do not know if he was supposed to return a percentage of those sales to Mary as they happened, or what the specific terms of the repayment following sales were. He was also to be scanning the originals and returning an archive of scans to Mary that could be used to continue to produce prints. From what I understand, he either did not return scans to her, or the scans he did produce were sub-par, and after the initial lump-sum payment (and possibly one or two of the periodic payments?) he failed to make the periodic payments to follow up. There was a news article that quoted Rogers lawyer talking about unanticipated difficulties they had with copyright and marketing the images, and that they might have to unwind the deal. By the time he was missing payments though, the "key" images of HOFers were long gone, and the bulk of the archive had been sold, so there really was no way to unwind the deal and return the negatives. I'm sure Mary would have much preferred to get the archive back, but by the time Rogers was missing payments, it was much too late. That there was a deal that essentially allowed Rogers to sell off the collateral before having paid for it boggles my mind, but perhaps there are nuances to the deal that I am not aware of. Whatever the case, the last I heard, Mary had joined the line of creditors and business partners suing Rogers, and nothing usable (either negatives or scans) had been returned to her.
That said, Rogers was not the only one who released Burke/Brace negatives into the collecting community. There was a large grouping of negatives (several thousand, if memory serves) that proceeded from the estate of Jim Rowe that were sold through either Mastro or Legendary (it was either one of the last Mastro auctions or one of the first Legendary auctions, can't recall offhand which). I do not know if these were ever broken up and resold, or if they remained together in some other archive. It would be difficult to discern if they did hit the market now.
There are also anecdotal accounts of Brace himself having sold or bartered negatives over the years. (One story I heard had him trading negatives for help changing a tire on his vehicle.) So all of that is to say that there were some Burke/Brace negatives on the market prior to Rogers getting them, but clearly he did the most damage in terms of breaking up the archive and scattering it to the winds. That this was done without producing a comprehensive catalog of scans for later use and reference is, to me, the biggest tragedy of the whole story.