Leon Jacobson, a long-time collector and dealer in nineteenth-century cameras and photographs has died at the age of 101. He was among a number of dealers who turned an interest into a business, become one of a pioneering group of dealers in photographs and photographic equipment in the early 1970s.
The son of Russian non-practicing Jewish immigrants, Leon was born in New York City in 1923. He attended Union College studying engineering. After World War II interrupted his degree course, he returned from the army and, thanks to the GI bill, was able to complete his degree at Princeton University where the army had earlier sent him on courses. Leon became an electrical engineer, working most of his career with General Electric in Syracuse, New York, He worked on radio-controlled missile guidance systems including for some of the early space launches by NASA and developed new methods for making printed circuits. He also taught a course in creativity for engineers which lead to important innovations. As a teenager he used to hang out at a local photographer’s premises in his home town of Gloversville, New York, sometimes helping out.
His first proper camera was a Foth Derby and he became a keen amateur photographer. In the late 1960s, he developed an interest in early cameras and photographs. When his son Ken came to London to study biophysics – initially lacking a scholarship from either UK or US governments – Leon handed him a copy of Sotheby’s seminal New York 1970 Strober photography catalogue with the admonition to look for old cameras and see if you can find anything ‘by some guy named Talbot.’
As a result of this collaboration and his own efforts, his wife Hilde and he became one of the first to publish a regular catalogue (a simple mimeograph) selling early cameras and photographs alongside people like Tom & Elinor Burrnside and George Rinhart. As Syracuse is not too far from Rochester, home of George Eastman House and photography museum, many of the young interns (later to become well-known names in the field like Grant Romer and Keith Davis) would often arrive for coffee and cookies at the Jacobsons’ house and also discover one of the few places where their meagre interns' salaries still allowed them to come home with an good early photograph as a souvenir.
Leon became quite adept at restoring old cameras needing conservation and gave a talk on this subject at the 1972 annual symposium held by the Photographic Historical Society of New York. In 1974, with the assistance of an electron microscopist at General Electric, he published a paper solving the problem of what caused ‘measles’ on daguerreotype plates that had been 'cleaned.'
In 1972 He published several arrticles in Eaton Lothrop's The Photographic Collectors' Newsletter which ran from 1968-1975 - the first publication of its type that predated any collecting or historical societies. IHe was elected to the board of the Photographic Historical Society of America in 1975.
With thanks to Ken Jacobson
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