There are photos from the Gansu Province of China taken by Joseph F. Rock, a pioneering botanist whose travel accounts were said to have been an inspiration for Shangri-La, the utopia of James Hilton's novel “Lost Horizon.” There are photos from the turn of the last century by George Shiras, who took some of the earliest nighttime wildlife pictures, using a tripwire hooked to a magnesium flash and to his camera's shutter. The images, including some of an albino deer, look eerily contemporary, like something you might expect to see elsewhere in Chelsea.
The exhibition also includes work not normally associated with the nature-and-natives reputation of the early National Geographic, like the obsessive, homoerotic pictures of Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, a German photographer known for his idyllic nude studies of young Sicilian boys. (The show will also include other, lesser-known examples of von Gloeden's pictures of girls.) And there will be a selection of photographs showing flight experiments from 1907 to 1909, taken in Nova Scotia by members of the lab of Alexander Graham Bell, one of the society's founders.
“Very little of this material exists anywhere else, because many of these pictures were taken specifically for National Geographic and they have the only copies,” said Mr. Kasher, who has previously overseen sales of images from the archives of The New York Times, The Daily News in New York and Magnum, the photo agency. Though prices for the prints have not been definitively set, they will probably range from $3,000 to more than $10,000 each, he said.
The society's archive was in Washington during its early years and then moved to Gaithersburg, Md., in the late 1970s. But in 1996 it moved back to the society's Washington headquarters on 17th Street, into a 2,000-square-foot underground room, designed by Mr. Bonner and lined with motorized shelves. “We call it the very foundation on which National Geographic sits,” said Ms. Mulvihill, who added that because the society is now, like many other institutions, digitizing its archives, the way was cleared to consider selling the original material from a stockpile of slightly less than a half-million vintage prints.
The archive also includes glass-plate negatives and one of the world's most important collections of autochromes, the earliest examples of color photography. In a walk-in refrigerated vault near the main archive room, the society stores hundreds of thousands of delicate 35-millimeter color transparencies and negatives, and its hard drives hold hundreds of thousands more images taken since the advent of digital photography.
Three further exhibitions planned by Mr. Kasher's gallery will offer new limited-edition color prints made from the society's negatives and digital files. (Though the society is selling the images, it will retain the digital and publication rights to them.)
Ms. Mulvihill said that while the black-and-white show would contain only a tiny fraction of the society's vintage prints, National Geographic had decided to hold nothing of that collection back from sale if the right buyers were interested. “In some cases, it would be painful,” she said, “but we would certainly consider the offer.” Revenue from the sales will support the overall mission of the society, which is a nonprofit.
While many of the black-and-white photographs to be exhibited fairly scream National Geographic — Willis Lee's pristine shots of an icy-looking Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico; Vittorio Sella's Alpine photographs, an important influence on Ansel Adams ; B. Anthony Stewart's pictures of sooty West Virginia miners — there is probably one picture that will stand out in that regard. It is a portrait from 1921 by Frank Hurley, an Australian adventurer who traveled extensively though New Guinea, showing a woman in traditional, minimal Papuan dress.
“I had to have at least one bare-breasted native in the show,” Mr. Kasher said. “Everyone would have been looking for one and wondering if I didn't.”
National Geographic's Treasures 