The Theft of a Priceless Churchill Portrait

> A simple image amplified and focused by hand, through delicate rotations of plates of glass, and filtered toward a tiny mirror contained inside a camera that projected the reflection toward a viewing screen. When Karsh opened the shutter for one-tenth of a second, he exposed an eight-by-ten sheet of light-sensitive nitrocellulose Kodak film to the reflection of Winston Churchill, creating a negative that later needed to be developed in darkness.

Karsh used an 8x10” monorail camera… there were no “delicate rotations of plates of glass”, such cameras don’t use helical focusing, instead a lens with fixed optical glass is moved back and forth using linear movements of either or both of the vertical stanchions.

There also is no “tiny mirror” reflecting anything… while (a very few) 8x10” reflex cameras have been built, they require an 8x10” mirror, and in any case this wasn’t a reflex camera at all. Karsh would have set the rough focus by moving the rear stanchion sufficiently far from the front stanchion to get rough focus at that distance from the film plane with the lens he was using, then he would have achieved fine focus by viewing a ground glass plate slightly larger than the negative set in the rear stanchion, light projected directly through the lens onto that ground glass forming an image flipped both vertically and horizontally from reality (Churchill’s head would have been on the bottom and any text on the cigar would have been flipped left to right)… no mirror of any size was involved. Once focus was set a light tight film back was inserted, replacing the ground glass with a sheet of film at the same distance from the optical center of the lens, hence the same focal distance. The lens’s shutter would then have been closed, a dark slide would have lifted to allow light to strike the film, and then the exposure was ready to be taken whenever Karsh (and Winston) were ready (-ish, in the case of Winston).

Lastly all film negatives, sheet or otherwise, had to be developed in the dark… the thing that made nitrocellulose special was that it really needed to be developed and stored away from flame.

In this case the buyer of the print is out of his money, the hotel got the print back, the criminal apparently caught, but really should not the auction house be on the hook for the money? Unless it comes back via the criminal, it would have been the auction house's job to verify this was not stolen. Not always possible, I understand, but.. ?

The article does not actually tell how the theft was executed.

  Experts long said the photograph’s real value was hard to peg. Previous sales of The Roaring Lion have fetched as much as $85,000 at auction. Though the actual stolen portrait managed to fetch only about $7,500 from a London auction house (significantly less than the $25,000 it was once insured for), Geller, as the lead investigator on the case, insists that the resale price didn’t matter to him as much as what it represented.

So priceless in the way that all unique things are priceless.

Interesting that so called great photographs are often the result of simple emotional tricks - pulling his cigar from his mouth in Churchill's case and for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor being told a story about a dog that had died to get their famous melancholy expression.