The theft of a Churchill portrait | Hacker News Reader

The theft of a Churchill portrait

thewalrus.ca

64 pointsprismatic27 comments

> 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.

About a year ago, I had an opportunity to use an 8x10 field camera. This description is correct. I didn't have any film, so I loaded the film holder with paper and developed it under a safelight in the darkroom. This isn't a typical process though and film has very low ISO. I then contact printed through the paper. The resulting image wasn't particularly sharp. It was a fun exercise though, and I'd like to borrow the camera again. Using it is a very slow and formal process. The film is as one would expect, expensive.

Paper negatives are interesting, but yes even when you’ve got a subject that sits still long enough and the camera is on a really steady tripod the result will still be a lot less than critically sharp when printed because the paper diffuses any light passed through it. Cheaper than film, but but vastly sharper than paper, are wet plate collodion processes like anbrotypes and tintypes, though you’ll either have to make (or have made) a back appropriate for glass or metal as the substrate.

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.. ?

>> it would have been the auction house's job to verify this was not stolen.

The auction house is a facilitator of a transaction between the parties. Unless they purchase the object from the seller first, they are not even a middle man. They are akin to ebay, a platform rather than a dealership. I'd bet that somewhere in the fine print is even a statement that any appraisals remain the opinion of the individual appraiser and are not the responsibility of the auction house.

Yeah, that's a fishy claim. You could perhaps say it's technically true he currently holds title... until a court rules otherwise. Which is certainly would, unless Italy is doing something very unusual.

I expect that's the statement of a lawyer in CYA mode; at some point he goes from unknowing victim to knowingly holding stolen property, which can start to cause legal issues.

The theft of it wasn’t even noticed for months. It got sold some months before they realized it was stolen.

I can’t find the article, but the buyer had stated that Sotheby’s mostly reimbursed him. Maybe he was out shipping or VAT? It also said, the buyer, an Italian lawyer, technically could have kept it, but chose not to.

I wonder if the fact that he was a lawyer had a significant impact on the decision. It is my understanding that in some jurisdictions lawyers are held to high ethics standards. I could see the local bar association taking disciplinary actions had he chosen to keep a painting he knew was stolen.

He wanted a conversation piece and he got one!

If it were me, I would have made the exchange contingent on eventually getting the forgery in return once the case was closed.

Presumably it technically was “given” to the hotel.

A report in The Globe and Mail indicated that the buyer was re-imbursed for most of the purchase cost. So very likely Sotheby's insurance provider is ultimately on the hook.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-italian-who...

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.

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