Large American Cinematographer Collection – Looking for the Right Home

Pete Wallington · Wednesday at 12:46 PM

After many years of joy I now need to reclaim the space taken up by my extensive collection of original American Cinematographer magazines and I'm trying to find the right person or institution who might appreciate having the collection as a physical reference/archive.

There are approximately 186 issues, with a particularly strong continuous run from 2007 onwards.

The collection includes:

2023: Issues 1–11
2022: Issues 1–12 — complete
2021: Issues 1–12 — complete
2020: Issues 1–12 — complete
2019: Issues 1–12 — complete
2018: Issues 1–12 — complete
2017: Issues 1–12 — complete
2016: Issues 1–12 — complete
2015: Issues 1–12 — complete
2014: Issues 1–12 — complete
2013: Issues 1–12 — complete
2012: Issues 1–12 — complete
2011: Issues 4–12
2010: September issue
2009: Issues 1–12 — complete
2008: Issues 1–12 — complete
2007: Issues 8–12, including the Authoring Images special supplement

There are also several earlier individual issues:

• January 1996 – Twelve Monkeys / Heat
• January 2003 – Gangs of New York / Catch Me If You Can
• January 2004 – The Last Samurai
• December 2006 – Casino Royale
• September 2010 – Boardwalk Empire

There are some particularly interesting issues throughout the collection covering films including The Dark Knight, Skyfall, The Avengers, Django Unchained, Gravity, Interstellar, Spectre, Mad Max: Fury Road, Star Wars, Blade Runner 2049, Game of Thrones, Dune, Oppenheimer and Avatar, among many others.

I'm UK-based and am trying to find the right person for the collection — perhaps a cinematographer, film student, researcher, collector, film school/library or someone who simply appreciates having the physical magazines as a reference.

I know that much of this material is now available digitally through the ASC archive, but I think there is still something useful about having a substantial physical run, particularly as a reference to how cinematography and film production have developed over the last couple of decades.

I'm posting here primarily to ask whether anyone knows of an appropriate home, collector or institution that might be interested in a collection of this size.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be very interested to hear them. I can also provide photographs and a more detailed issue list if useful.

Thanks!

Daniel D. Teoli Jr. · Friday at 12:01 PM

Put them on eBay England as a group. I'd take them as a donation, cut them up, run them through the sheetfed scanner and upload to the Internet Archive. But I'm in the USA. And maybe the publisher would complain about copyright, and it would all be for naught. It has happened before when someone donated a large collection of Playboy V.I.P. magazines to the archive.

He was in England and used to buy on eBay USA. He would have them shipped to me and I would scan them for him for his research. Playboy V.I.P. magazine dealt with the Playboy Club. They were from the 1970's and 80's. You would think that Playboy would not complain, but they did.

Institutions dealing in your field usually have good coverage of such things unless they are just getting into the field to add to their scope of collection. But it does not hurt to try soliciting them. I had a large collection of American Cinematographer, but early ones from the film era. I lost a good deal of them when a storage locker I was renting got a leak in the roof. But I was able to scan a decent portion of them.

When I looked it up at the I.A. I found they have a massive archive of the magazines. So that would be encouraging if someone wanted to scan and upload more to the I.A.

https://archive.org/search?tab=all&query=american+cinematographer&and[]=mediatype%3A"texts"

But they seem to be PDF or so-so quality. I generally work in high or decent res JPEGs when it comes to magazines. I'm not much for low-res.

Well, good luck finding a home for the collection!

Edited Friday at 12:01 PM by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.