GUEST: We received it in the 1960s from a dear family friend who worked at the Portland Police Station. They were putting it all on microfiche and throwing them away, so I don't know how many remain out there, but there's one. And it's from April of 1902 to November 1903.
APPRAISER: So it is a crime album, or what we call a mugshot album.
GUEST: Correct.
APPRAISER: And what appealed to you about this album?
GUEST: Well, one, that we've had it in our family since I was a small child, and all my sisters and I have enjoyed it. I just think it's cool. And it's about Portland's history. You can see when the riverfront was really active and the Shanghai Tunnels. There's river pirates and all kinds of things they'd been arrested for. So it's kind of cool.
APPRAISER: Can you explain to me what the Shanghai Tunnels were?
GUEST: We have tunnels underneath the older parts of the city that people could travel underneath. And maybe there were a lot of opium dens, prostitution, people would live down there.
APPRAISER: Okay, so Portland has a very colorful history.
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: And what we see in this album are very detailed stories about the men and women who were picked up by the police. So they're identified by name. If we look over here, their alias is also identified, where they lived, their age, their weight, occupation, their crime. These images have a relationship to photography that's part of a new genre of photography called vernacular photography.
GUEST: Really?
APPRAISER: The photography of the everyday, the photography that's a record, that's a document, that has a historic truth. But the neat thing about these images is, they also are very collectible as fine art photographs-- institutions, private collectors-- because when we look at these pictures, they tell us something about people that speaks a universal truth. So if I turn the page, we see some more of the pictures, and most of the pages have as many as eight images. We didn't do a count of the number of photographs in the album.
GUEST: No.
APPRAISER: Some of the pages are complete, and many of them are incomplete.
GUEST: Yeah, there's a few that aren't.
APPRAISER: Okay.
GUEST: So I'm going to say there are about 1,500 photographs in this crime album. Were this to come to public auction, an estimate would be in the $6,000 to $9,000 range.
APPRAISER: Wow. That's... wow. We'll all be surprised over that, yes!
