Inessential Stuff

Charles M. Conlon is rarely mentioned in books of the history of photography, and his name is even unknown to many fervent baseball fans. But he was a brilliant photographer who documented the early modern baseball era, photographing the greats of the game, as well as the average players, and even the utterly obscure.

The power of his images is in his ability to capture the personalities of the players, most of whom were, in that area, ordinary young men who took second jobs in the off-season to support themselves.

Conlon was an amateur photographer and a newspaperman at the New York World-Telegram, which featured some of the most complete baseball coverage of all New York newspapers. One day, in 1904, his editor asked if he’d go out to the ballparks and photograph some of the players. He did so, hauling along bulky equipment, ranging out of the studio, for the next 38 years, compiling the most complete and famous record of baseball from that period.

He wasn’t the best photographer technically—he struggled often with focus and often guessed at exposure in difficult lighting situations, though he constantly experimented to improve himself. He also had no pretense to art.  Furthermore, his images are often neglected because his subject matter was baseball players, at the time, many of whom were ruffians pulled from the coalmines and farmlands.  It was not considered a gentleman’s game.

However, his images go beyond documenting baseball and reach the level of art based on the power of his portraiture, which capture the personality of the players. One can see in the portrait of Babe Ruth, for instance, not just a powerful man, but the vulnerability and even sadness in the eyes of man raised in an orphanage who usually hid behind bluster and a larger-than-life personality.

I am particularly fond of his portrait of Christy Mathewson, taken in 1915. From 1903-1914, Matthewson won over 71% of his games, averaged 27 wins a year, and was one of the two most dominant pitchers in all of baseball. In 1915, however, it all started slipping away. Mathewson would have his first losing season in 13 years, struggle to strike batters out, and be hit hard, giving up more home runs than anyone in baseball. He had, in one year, gone from dominant, to a below-average pitcher.

And during that season, Conlon took Mathewson’s picture. You can see the story in his face. He is a big, strong man, a proud man, but it is no longer easy. His hair is sweaty. He looks tired. Always considered a great gentleman of the game, his smile of only an imitation. He would be traded the next year, and only pitch 26 more games before retiring.

Conlon, who shot with a Hassleblad and a Speed Graflex, shot on glass negatives, 8000 of which survive. He retired from photography when his wife died in 1942, and he died 3 years later.

Many of his original photographs can be found in baseball’s Hall of Fame. His images can be collected in baseball card form in a series released by The Sporting News in the 1990s, and in the book Baseball’s Golden Age:  The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon.  They will appeal not just to baseball fans, or photography enthusiasts, but to anyone drawn to powerful portraiture.

(This is the first in what I plan to be a regular series, featuring photographers whom, or photographs which, I find inspirational.  Today’s feature, on the day of the Major League Baseball All-Star game, is of the most important baseball photographer of the first half of the 20th century.)