Charles Conlon: Unknown Baseball Photographer

In 1839, when Louis Daguerre announced that he had perfected the photographic process that bears his name, the game of "softball" spread up and down the East Coast. By the early 20th century, with the advent of handheld cameras and the proliferation of newspapers and magazines featuring black-and-white photography, the sport became a national pastime.

Born in 1868, Charles M. Conlon was a proofreader for the New York Telegraph and began taking up photography as a hobby. Encouraged by an editor, he began frequenting baseball stadiums in the 1900s. He soon used his Graflex camera to fill The Telegraph and prominent baseball publications including The Sporting News and Spalding Guide with riveting, intimate photos. By the time he took his last photo, in the early 1940s, Conlon had become one of baseball's most important documentarians.

Photography rapidly expanded after Conlon's death in 1945. developed thoroughly. Cameras, film, and lenses were technologically advanced, and color images were ubiquitous in glossy publications like Sports Illustrated. Conron and baseball's other pioneers, including Louis Van Oorn, Carl Horner and George Grantham Bain, had their glass panes relegated to the newspaper morgue.

, but Kanglon's work was rediscovered in 1990. The Sporting News obtained the surviving glass negatives taken by Conlon and hired photo conservator Constance McCabe to make prints from them. She told her brother Neil, a baseball researcher in Los Angeles, who found himself "blown away" by Conlon's art and anonymity. In 1993, the brother-sister duo published Baseball's Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon (Harry Abrams). This book is a revelation, a time machine to the days of wooden baseball diamonds, day games and legal pinball. The visual equivalent of Lawrence Ritter's glory days, The Golden Age is a groundbreaking oral history of the early days of professional baseball.

Roger Angell, a longtime New Yorker staff writer, called it "the best collection of baseball photos ever published."

Nearly 20 years later, Neil collaborated with Constance McCabe to publish a second volume. Major Exhibition: Charles M. Conlon's Golden Age Baseball Photographs (Abrams). This sequel, published to commemorate the 125th anniversary of The Sporting News, may be better than the original. Stars like Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, and Bob Feller are all well represented, but there's plenty of room for stars like Walter Cruise, George McQueen, and Paul Critchell . Their careers are forgotten, but from Conlon's perspective, their similarities are not.

Learn more about some of the topics at Pharmaron in our photo essay.

David Davies is the author of Shepherd's Bush, about the London 1908 Olympic Marathon, to be published by St. Martin's Press in June 2012.