Howard L. Bingham valuation
Muhammad Ali's friend and photographer for more than half a century.
Howard L. Bingham (1939–2016) was an American photographer who met the young Cassius Clay in Los Angeles in 1962 and remained his close friend and personal photographer until the end of Ali's life.
What a work by Howard L. Bingham is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Howard L. Bingham (1939–2016) was an American photographer who met the young Cassius Clay in Los Angeles in 1962 and remained his close friend and personal photographer until the end of Ali's life. The archive that resulted is one of the most complete photographic records of any sportsman — fights, training camps, travel, family, and the long years of Parkinson's disease. He also photographed the civil rights era and the Black Panther Party for Life magazine.
What comes to market is photographic prints, most often of Ali, made at different times and in different sizes. Value turns on when and how a print was made — one printed close to the time is a different object from a later print of the same negative — and on whether it carries the photographer's signature, stamp or label. Prints signed by Ali as well circulate widely, and his signature brings a separate authentication question of its own. Photographs of the front and the back, including any stamps, are where a valuation starts.
The Sentinel, Life magazine and A Thirty-Year Journey
Bingham was born in Jackson, Mississippi, the son of a minister and Pullman porter. He failed his first photography course, then served an eighteen-month apprenticeship at the Los Angeles Sentinel under its chief photographer, Cliff Hall, and it was there that he met the young Cassius Clay. He became one of the first Black photographers on a Hollywood camera crew of the International Cinematographers Guild, and his pictures ran in Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, People and Ebony.
His book Muhammad Ali: A Thirty-Year Journey collects the pictures from the friendship. Beyond Ali, he photographed the Black Panthers for Life, interviewed James Earl Ray, and was one of the photographers chosen for the 1990 project Songs of My People. M+B Photo showed his Rumble in the Jungle pictures in 2008, and in 2015 he was one of seven photographers in Light Catchers at the California African American Museum.
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