Jack Naylor - The Collecting Years

The Collecting Years

When he began his collecting, Jack Naylor concentrated on cameras and photographs, but he quickly expanded to all manner of ephemera and photographica. Much of the collection was acquired at camera and antique shows, auctions, and yard sales. Many of the items were donated by photographers and inventors of the paraphernalia that supports photography. Since Boston is one of the epicenters of photography, he befriended innovators like Edwin Land, who founded Polaroid and "Doc" Harold Edgerton, professor of MIT, who invented the strobe light. Naylor owns the notebooks and scientific equipment of Leopold Godowsky, who along with Leopold Mannes co-invented the first color film.

The majority of the thirty thousand object collection is displayed at Naylor's suburban Boston home. The narrow pathways around the basement museum are like a maze. You have to carefully watch your step or you might trip on or bump into some priceless artifact. The 1031 daguerreotypes eclipse the 725 owned by the Library of Congress. Daguerreotypes are such a rich foundation of photography's early history. Their quality is unprecedented and there are one-of-a-kind examples produced by the finest practitioners of the medium, such as, Southworth & Hawes, Whipple, and Mathew Brady.

The dozens of glass display cases contain the world's largest collection of cameras used for espionage. Equipment produced for spying that spans the period from the American Civil War through the Cold War with Russia. Cameras that were worn by homing pigeons in the First World War, cameras mounted onto U2 spy planes, books, watches and cigarette lighters that conceal picture making devices. East German Stasi, British OSS, CIA and FBI are all represented. Some of them make annual pilgrimages to Naylor's museum to review their legacy. He acquired some of the most select items in the 1980s from a KGB agent he met in the USSR on a business trip.

Covering every inch of wall space are images by the giants of picture taking: Cecil Beaton, Yousef Karsh, Ansel Adams, William Wegman, Brad Washburn, and Alfred Eisenstaedt to name just a few. Pulitzer Prize winning photographs, Pictures of the Year and icons that are seared into the collective visual consciousness of the world's population. Naylor has original glass plates by Edward Curtis taken with huge field cameras while he traversed the American West for thirty years documenting Native Americans and their vanishing cultures. Thereby one of the most ambitious anthropological projects is preserved since most of the Curtis negatives were destroyed.

Upstairs there is a library of over 3000 volumes. Packed away are books, journals, notebooks, albums and first editions. Most impressive amongst them is a complete limited edition set of "Pencil of Nature", the first commercial book that included photographs. It was published by Fox Talbot, one of the people attributed with inventing photography.

Nikon, Eastman, Fuji, Leitz, Graflex, Deardorff, Minox are all trademarks we recognize. They and Naylor's knowledge contribute to countless magazines and anthologies. Objects from a time gone by. Preserved for us to see. Recently Jack has been the subject of articles in Smithsonian magazine, Wall Street Journal, etc. He and his collection have been on NPR and the Discovery Channel.