Vintage Valatie ~ The Guy Gamello Collection

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The twenty-two photos presented here from the permanent collection of  the village of Valatie were originally recorded on 4­ x ­5­ inch silver  and glass plate negatives for L. Frank Fowler, purveyor of newspapers in  a shop on the village Main Street.
 

During the first decades of the nineteenth century, a new method for  documenting our physical world was born. Popular and commercial use of  the photograph neatly dovetailed with Valatie's status as the center of  business in Northern Columbia County, New York.
 

The silver and glass negatives employed here offer the very precise impressions recorded over a century ago; these extraordinary surviving images provide a remarkable glimpse into a vanished past, while also underscoring constants of geographical and architectural landmarks. The resulting modern prints afford us an intellectual voyeurism, a peep into an earlier era, each with an historical moment preserved for present and future generations.  

Many of these images were widely published by offset lithography as colorized postcards early in the last century, and are now within the public domain; several postcard-examples are preserved in Valatie’s Paul R. Johann Local History Archive.
 

In the mid-1980s, Valatie history buff Guy Gamello discovered Fowler's antique silver and glass negatives that had been lost for more than half  a century.  Town resident Ed Simonson organized the scanning project of  the still-crisp images, which were printed (with modern equipment) for  the Village of Valatie.  While Gamello donated the original glass negatives to the Columbia County Historical Society, he stipulated that exclusive copyrights and ownership of the digital scanned images belong to the Village of Valatie. The two institutions will collaborate in future exhibitions of this important material.
   

Valatie Village Historian Dominick Lizzi collaborated with the photo technicians to identify each image.

All Vintage Valatie Photos Reproduced here with permission: All digital images © Village of Valatie, All Rights Reserved.

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VINTAGE VALATIE: The Guy Gamello Collection
contact Barbara Fischer: Clerk@ValatieVillage.com
or call 518.758.9806   

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