Zikmund Reach – Praha. Photographic Album. Silver gelatin prints

Reach, Zikmund (1859–1935) – Praha [Prague]. Prague: Sigmund Reach, ca. 1910. Accordion (leporello) photographic album, 19.5 × 14.5 cm, containing 20 large original silver-gelatin photographs, each approximately 16.5 × 12.5 cm, mounted on black card leaves, with printed Czech caption labels. Original black wrappers with “PRAHA.” painted in gold to front and pictorial trade label reading “SIGM. REACH / PRAHA II. – TYRŠOVA 12.” Very good condition, with some age-related wear. An attractive photographic souvenir album of Prague issued by Zikmund Reach, the important Prague photographer, antiquarian bookseller, publisher, philatelist, and pioneering collector of historical photographs. Reach began photographing Prague in the late 1880s and assembled an extensive photographic record of the city; research on his work records approximately 87 albums devoted to old Prague. The twenty photographs present views and monuments of Prague, including Prague Castle and St. Vitus Cathedral, the main entrance to Prague Castle, Hradčany and Charles Bridge, the Old Town Bridge Tower, Powder Tower, Old Town Hall and Astronomical Clock, Church of Our Lady before Týn, Jan Hus Monument, St. Wenceslas Square, Old-New Synagogue, Old Jewish Cemetery, and panoramic views of the city. The photographs are original silver gelatin prints. Although the album is clearly an issue of Reach's Prague firm, individual photographic authorship should be treated with some caution: Reach was both a photographer and an important collector and publisher of photographs and negatives by others, and contemporary “Foto Reach” attribution does not invariably mean that Reach himself made the negative. Institutional collections nevertheless preserve original photographic positives attributed directly to Reach, including comparable views of old Prague from around 1900.