Donor support extends shelf life of Charles Conlon’s images of baseball’s earliest heroes

As baseball captured the public imagination in the early 20th century, one man sought to document its heroes through his camera.

And now, thanks to preservation efforts as part of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s Digital Archive Project, those images will be enjoyed by future generations.

Charles M. Conlon was among the first to regularly shoot baseball games and players, and in doing so he became a singular name in photography. He was a proofreader for the New York Telegram in 1904 when his editor suggested he take a Graflex single-lens camera to Gotham’s ballparks. However, while his portraits of famous players including Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, Napoleon Lajoie and Babe Ruth would eventually be seen and distributed across the country, his own name remained largely anonymous until 1990.

That’s when over 8,000 of Conlon’s photo negatives were found in the morgues of the Sporting News offices, and it was discovered that he was the man behind many of the game’s most enduring portraits. Grouped together, Conlon’s photos share a motif: They have a way of channeling the viewer’s attention directly to the player’s facial expression. The viewer gets the sense that he or she was there on the diamond with Conlon while he worked with the living legends.