Every few centuries, someone rediscovers America. After the first humans arrived from Asia roughly 15,000 years ago, Vikings touched down in Newfoundland in the year 1000. Half a millennium later, Christopher Columbus spotted a small island in what is now the Bahamas, and in 1769, Gaspar de Portolà was the first European to gaze upon San Francisco Bay, whose indigenous people had remained hidden behind a thick wall of fog throughout most of America’s Colonial era.
Thirty years ago, a Frenchman named Marc Walter rediscovered America once again when he happened upon an old color photograph in a Paris flea market. “He didn’t know what it was, so he asked the seller,” says Sabine Arqué, who has been friends with Walter for decades. “The seller didn’t know, either,” she continues. “He said, ‘It’s just a color photograph.’ They were worth nothing at the time so the seller pulled out his cache and said, ‘Come, take the lot. I can’t sell them.’ That was the beginning of his collection.”
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