Jack Naylor: The Camera Man

Photography has certainly evolved from its scientific development in the late 1800s to today's digital domain, and 90-year-old Jack Naylor has been there to see most of it.

In his home, he keeps a collection that houses some of the earliest cameras and images. It's a collection that documents the history of the world - Churchill, Einstein, VJ Day, Native Americans, Kennedy - and of photography itself.

In the mid-1800s, it could take up to ten minutes of exposure time to create daguerreotypes. By the 1950s, the father of flash photography, Harold "Doc" Edgerton, had that time down to a faction of a second.

Naylor also has equipment in his collection - cameras for underwater and cameras for the sky.

If a picture speaks 1,000 words, Naylor's home is a non-stop conversation. He even has the ornate device called a megaletoscopio, believed to be the only one in the world.

"I had an innate love for photography. Why? I'm not quite sure, but I did," Naylor said. "And so I always carried a camera or two with me. And that got me into photography. It got me in very deeply, as you can probably tell!"

As the head of a successful engineering company, Naylor traveled the world and could afford to build his collection. It has taken him more than 50 years of painstakingly gathering each piece, until eventually he had accumulated more than 31,000 items. Some of the treasures came from close to home.

"We had a lady who called me one day and said, 'Mr. Naylor, I've just discovered 12 old cameras in my attic. They belonged to my grandfather.' And she was an old lady at the time and didn't live that far away. I was absolutely dumbfounded to find about a dozen of the rarest cameras in the world: daguerreotype cameras. And that was probably the greatest find I've ever had. She gave them to me and [was] happy to get rid of them. And I was delighted, of course, to have them!"

Naylor can't say exactly which cameras are his favorites, but he's clearly partial to the capturing of covert images.

"I have a lovely space in my heart for espionage," he said.

During the Cold War, Naylor spent time in Russia on business and eventually befriended members of the KGB. Later, often under shadowy circumstances, the KGB would deliver to Naylor some cagey tools of their spy trade.

"It's a ladies' purse," he said, showing CBS News technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg a spy camera. "Now the KGB had lady spies before we did, well before we did, and they were very well-trained. But here is the inside of the case - and here is the camera."

There's the buttoned-up jacket camera, the dubious pigeon camera, which snapped an image above France during World War I. And there is also the fashionable garter camera.

"All of them still work," Naylor said. "I've never had a camera that didn't work. If it didn't work, I made it work."

The cameras are the machines, but the men and women behind those cameras are the artists and many of the world's greatest could be counted among Naylor's friends.

"Ansel Adams, for example, was one of my special photographers," he said. "Bradford Washburn, the Bostonian, the Ph.D was one of my special photographers. I knew these people. I went to meetings with them. And there are five or six that I became very friendly with. Margaret Bourke-White, for example; We were friends until she died. I met her in World War II. I snapped a picture of her."

Their work brought us the world: Bourke-White its humanity, Washburn its beauty, and Adams its majesty.

Naylor's collection has been called the largest in the world. But now he is selling it at auction.

"When you're 90 years old, what are you gonna do? Live to be 110? Unlikely," Naylor said. "You're gonna have to get rid of it. Do I like it? Do I enjoy doing it? Of course not. It's been part of my life for so long that there's no way anyone could possibly like doing what I'm doing right now. But I couldn't think of another alternative. And so, here we are. I'm getting rid of it. I have no complaints, no cries. It will give others a chance to have some fun, too."

Naylor initially tried to sell the complete collection for $20 million but couldn't find a buyer willing to keep it intact for that price. So he decided to break it up, selling each piece separately at auction at Guernsey's - the bigger items going this weekend. The bulk will be available online, and he doesn't plan to keep anything.

"I don't think my wife would permit it," he said. "Aside from that, I can't think of a reason to keep one thing. There are so many things in the collection that have certain sentimental values and have certain real values that I could very easily pick one, or two, or three, or four, or 20, or 50. But that's not the way I'm built, I'm afraid. They're all gonna go."

But even when the prints hang on somebody else's walls, when the equipment becomes show pieces for other collectors, for Naylor it will always remain a lasting image - dare we say it? - a photographic memory.