The Expert Eye

In this episode, I tell the story of how I got to research a very rare photograph by Diane Arbus that she took while on assignment for a magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland.  The photograph features 5 youngsters on the stoop of their rowhouse in Queens, sporting monster masks.  It sold for $50,000 in 2019.  Why is this photo so important?  I'll fill you in.

A German Photographer named Albert Frisch was responsible for some of the first photographs taken in the Upper Amazon.  Among those images are ones of a rubber tree and a man working with latex.  Why is this important? Aimee gets to the bottom of our very complicated history with this special tree.

In 1939, LIFE photojournalist Hansel Mieth took a photograph that would haunt her for the rest of her life.  That photograph was … of a monkey.

In this episode, Aimee talks about the time she handled a print of this image and the surprising history behind it.

At the height of Polar Mania, three Swedish explorers went on the search for the North Pole by hot air balloon. This episode tells the story of what happened when documentary photographs taken by the adventurers were found in the ice, years later.

Aimee visits an intriguing exhibition at The Met and realizes that it is coincidentally connected to a print she catalogued for an upcoming auction by pioneering photographer Florence Henri.

A 1933 image of rooftops by influential British photographer Bill Brandt comes across Aimee’s desk, and she tries to get to the bottom of how Brandt made this print using her mantra: Look, Touch, Think, Look (again).  She nearly misses some important clues.

A photographic discovery by astronomer Sir John Herschel inadvertently influences the mad experimentation of playwright August Strindberg, leading to surprising results.