A TREASURE TROVE FROM MANILA Photographs by Lowell Riley • Text by Thomas Hauser Photographs courtesy of and copyrighted by Justin Pestana
A half century after Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier wreaked havoc on one another in the most brutal of their historic confrontations, a treasure trove of photographs memorializing their epic third battle has surfaced. Lowell Riley was a photographer who shared a studio with Herbert Muhammad in the 1960s and took photographs on a freelance basis for the Nation of Islam newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. Eight years ago, Riley’s art intersected with a teacher named Justin Pestana. Pestana was born in 1982, grew up in Massachusetts and has taught
world history and American history at the middle and high school levels. He’s a boxing fan and has collected Ali memorabilia since he was a kid. In 2018, Pestana recalls, “I came across a small group of images from Ali-Frazier III that were put up for auction by Evans Archive on eBay and were identified as Lowell Riley’s work. Both the physical slides and the photographer’s rights to the negatives were being auctioned, and I bought them for a few hundred dollars. As time went by, there were more auction lots of four to 12 photos each that I won for bids as high as $635 per lot. Finally, I arranged with Lelands to buy the remaining
slides – there were about 106 of them – without an auction for $3,000. My understanding is that Evans Archive and Lelands were connected through Andrea Evans Young and her brother [Joshua Leland Evans], who was the founder and CEO of Lelands. I know that Riley took the photographs. I believe he was also the original consignor, but I’m not certain of that. According to Lelands, the entire collection consisted of about 10,000 images. But I was only interested in the Ali-Frazier III photos.” Pestana’s archive consists of 242 original 35mm color transparencies and negatives of images photographed by Riley from ringside at the Araneta
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