If you ask Rich Jahn about the photographs he has collected for more than four decades, he takes a long view.
“We never own these images. We are only the keepers of history during our tenure of collecting. Someday someone else will be looking at these soldiers and saying, ‘I wonder where this image came from. Who had it before me? How did these images survive after all these years?’”
Jahn, of Paramus, N.J., became aware of the Civil War in boyhood after his father bought him a souvenir felt kepi with crossed rifles and an American flag decal. That was in the mid-1950s, when Jahn was about 10 years old and the Civil War Centennial approached on the near horizon. Later on, an eighth-grade class trip to Gettysburg and exposure to military history in high school heightened his enthusiasm. “My more intense interest came when my brother’s best friend invited me to his home to see his Civil War collection,” Jahn explains. “I was hooked. From that day on I knew I would become a collector.”
Jahn became serious about image collecting in the mid-1970s after he bought a carte de visite of a Union infantryman for four dollars. Back then, he bought anything and everything—broken, bent, damaged, of questionable authenticity. Then. his brother’s friend stepped in with some advice: “You’re a young guy, Rich. You have a lot of years ahead of you to collect. Buy the best! Buy from reputable sellers or dealers. Go quality, not quantity,” Jahn recalls. “His words always ring true in my mind every time I make a decision on a trade or purchase.”
Over the years, Jahn developed his own collector’s instinct, evident in the representative images displayed here. “Sometimes I see a soldier armed to the teeth, loaded with photographer’s props, flags, rare carbines, etc.,” he says. “Do I try to add them to my collection? You betcha. But there is more to collecting than that. I might see a young soldier sitting tensely or nervously as he is photographed but he doesn’t have any props, weapons, flags etc., but I’m captivated by the pose, content, size of the image or contrast or just plain wondering who he was.”
What really drives Jahn to collect though is a connection to our country and its history.
“I’m a guy who loves America and the men and women who fought to protect what they thought were the right ideals for each other. The Civil War soldiers were heroes—whether from the North or South. That’s what it was all about. Hopefully, that’s what I’m about.”
