The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
How a retired cop’s second profession turned into an historic obsession
Joseph Buberger calls himself a “photomaniac” and he says so with a smile and a gleam in his eyes.
When Buberger retired from the New Haven Police Department in 1975 because of a disability, he needed a hobby. But he never imagined his collecting of daguerreotypes would make him an internationally recognized expert in the field.
When I sat down with Buberger at his home in Hamden last Tuesday afternoon, he recalled the first time he came upon a daguerreotype, a photographic exposure made on a silvered copper plate and developed with mercury vapors. When the first ones were brought to America from France in 1839, they introduced this country to photography and caused a sensation.
“It was named after Louis Daguerre,” Buberger noted. “This was the first time an image was ever captured. It became a phenomenon, ‘Daguerreomania.’”
Buberger didn’t know anything about this when he walked into a New York antiques store one day in the mid-1970s to have a 1914 camera appraised. It turned out to be of little value but in that shop Buberger glimpsed a box of odd-looking photographs.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he said. “I asked the owner, ‘What is this? What are these old pictures?’ I saw the silver and the light. I loved it. I bought the whole box.”
Buberger said it wasn’t just the appearance of those items that got to him. “I was attracted to knowing they were the first pictures ever made. And they were one of a kind. There was never a negative.”
But Buberger developed into more than just your usual collector. As he learned more and began traveling to shops, estate sales and auction sites, buying more and more daguerreotypes, “It became a profession and an obsession.”
Indeed, he was visibly excited during our interview as we talked about his favorite ones. “My head is bouncing off Abraham Lincoln and Vincent Van Gogh!”
Buberger has a reproduction of what he insists is the earliest photographic image of Lincoln, from about 1843, out of Springfield, Illinois, well before Lincoln became president. The original is owned by Robert and Joan Hoffman of Pittsford, New York.
Buberger was invited to the Hoffman house around 1990 to see it.
“My first impression, when I opened the case, was, ‘Boy! This guy is tall!’”
Buberger said he had never studied Lincoln’s face before then. But when he and a fellow dealer, Allen Phillips, used computer-assisted overlay techniques, superimposing the daguerreotype atop known photographs of Lincoln, most of the facial features lined up perfectly.
In 1994, when American Heritage magazine ran an in-depth story — “Is This the First Photograph of Abraham Lincoln?” — writer Harold Holzer noted all the work Buberger had done in his effort to prove the man who posed for that daguerreotype was in fact the young Lincoln.
Holzer called Buberger “a wellknown historian of and dealer in antique photographica who has emerged as the picture’s most impassioned champion.”
Holzer added: “It is precisely its one-of-a-kind nature that consumes the unbridled believer Joe Buberger, who concedes that he started out ‘engrossed’ by it but now counts himself ‘obsessed.’ Buberger is no mere cheerleader. Previously, he unearthed daguerreotypes of Sam Houston and Frederick Douglass, both now in museums, and his reputation in the field is impeccable.”
Buberger lamented, “When that story was published, every newspaper in America had it. Then it became a cold case. An unfinished cold case.”
For many years, Buberger has been fuming over the letter he received in September 2004 from Ann Shumard, the curator of photographs for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. She wrote: “I do not believe that the daguerreotype in question is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. I can only call them as I see them.”
Buberger said Shumard refused to meet with him so he could present his case. “She didn’t have time to show the American people that that picture was Lincoln. This is a shame. The American people don’t know about it.”
He showed me a letter he received in 1995 from Henry C. Lee, the renowned forensics investigator based in Connecticut. Referring to a report by Albert B. Harper, the principal of the Forensic Science Consortium, in which the members concluded the Lincoln daguerreotype was authentic, Lee wrote: “I concur with their views.”
“When Henry Lee tells you that’s the guy, that’s the guy!” Buberger said.
Ironically, Buberger has a daguerreotype of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin. He bought it from a New Haven antiques dealer a few years ago.
Buberger, who had brought it out of a bank vault where he stores the item, showed me the image: here is the young, handsome actor, glowering directly at the photographer.
“I’m still amazed by it,” Buberger said. “It really does stop time.”
He added, “In the collecting world, this is a real killer.”
Buberger co-owns the Van Gogh daguerreotype with his partner, Tom Stanford of Massachusetts; Stanford has it in safekeeping.
“Tom found it years ago in western Massachusetts. He went into a guy’s shop, saw the portrait shot of Vincent in a photo album and almost dropped dead,” Buberger said. “He had studied Van Gogh, so he knew the face immediately.”
“He bought it from the dealer for one dollar! Tommy told me he couldn’t sleep for three days.”
Although some experts question the authenticity of that Van Gogh, Buberger said his forensic research shows it is the real thing, the only portrait photograph taken of Van Gogh as an adult and what the artist used as a model to create his self-portraits.
Buberger, now 72, said he no longer drives around and collects daguerreotypes. “If I started collecting again, my wife would scratch my eyes out!” he joked.
Through the years, he said, “I didn’t make a lot of money on this. But I had my fun. It’s a real treat to come up with these things.”