Collecting is often a hobby that starts when we’re in grade school. Did you have a childhood hobby? I did. I loved learning about family history and old photos. I’m still passionate about it today.
My guest’s hobby of collecting old photographs of famous stars of television and movies is a lifetime pursuit. At some point, he began gathering bits of New York’s picture history one box of glass negatives at a time. When I asked him about the size of his collection, he laughed. Yup…that a clue to how many pictures in his collection. A LOT. Prints get saved (sometimes) but negatives are often discarded, but to Ray Simone, those pieces of history are worth a second look. We chatted about his lifetime of saving the past, how he preserves his collection, and how you can obtain a print.
Related Episodes:
Episode 103: Organize, Preserve, and Share with Collectionaire.com
Episode 101: Rediscovering an American Community of Color
Links:
- Original Vintage Fine Art Photographs
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About My Guest:
Ray Simone has been a professional photographer for over 20 years, shooting fashion throughout NYC and product photography.
He has been collecting original vintage photographs since he was 10 years old and when he started shooting professionally he decided to start collecting original camera negatives. Ray would search the city far and wide for them. 6th Ave between 14 & 34th Streets was a treasure trove before the 1990’s came along. There were many empty parking lots on weekends where people would be selling everything you can imagine, but his eye was focused on negatives.
One day about 10 years ago after cleaning up his photo studio Ray decided to start to retouch & restore those negatives and make fine art prints.
All of his prints come from the original camera negative and are printed at the highest HD possible on the finest fine art paper available.
Ray is a born and raised New Yorker.
About Maureen Taylor:
Maureen is a frequent keynote speaker on photo identification, photograph preservation, and family history at historical and genealogical societies, museums, conferences, libraries, and other organizations across the U.S., London and Canada. She’s the author of several books and hundreds of articles and her television appearances include The View and The Today Show (where she researched and presented a complete family tree for host Meredith Vieira). She’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, The Boston Globe, Martha Stewart Living, Germany’s top newspaper Der Spiegel, American Spirit, and The New York Times. Maureen was recently a spokesperson and photograph expert for MyHeritage.com, an internationally known family history website and also writes guidebooks, scholarly articles and online columns for such media as Smithsonian.com. Learn more at Maureentaylor.com