Copyright ©2011 Howard Schickler. All rights reserved.
Modern golf and the paper photograph share a fascinating link: They were born at the same time, around 1840, on the same isle, Great Britain. After the invention of the photograph in England, some of the first practitioners of the new medium of photography plied their art and trade in St. Andrew’s, Scotland. Little is known about the connection of golf and photography in those early years; in fact the first paper photographs of Scottish golfers seem to date from the mid to late 1840s. Perhaps it was that the first photographers came from the upper classes, and the first professional golfers were from the working class.
With this history in mind, and due to the lack of public exposure of institutional collections of historical golf photography, this archive began as a result of the desire to collect and curate a museum-quality collection of vintage, original photographs depicting major championship winners from the mid 19th century through the Bobby Jones era of the 1920s and 30s. The goal was to amass an exhaustive archive of early British and American golf, both men’s and ladies, of winners and important participants of the early professional and amateur championships including the Open Championship, British Amateur, the US Open, US Amateur, and other majors of the era. The only restrictions in acquiring these photographs was that each one was to be of both historical and artistic importance.
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