[sphere and ash]

PSA’s photo type system was meant to replace the system that has long been used in the larger photography market, where people buy and sell works by the likes of Walker Evans, Edward Weston, and Cindy Sherman. The photography market has shown no signs of taking it up, and that is because the photography market’s methodology is more flexible and superior, as the following two examples will reveal.

The first thing a visitor to Nat Fein’s house saw was a 16x20 print of the image he called Three Bows Out. He considered it his ur-print, the representative example by which he wanted you to know his work. But that very print that was displayed by Fein’s front door will never be designated Type 1 by PSA because of the limitations of the Type system.

There is a 16x20 print that was probably printed around 1948—at the very least, we know it was unlikely to have been printed after around 1954 because there are no chemical brighteners in the paper, which would cause it to fluoresce. In the photography market, the print would be considered a vintage print, which is defined as one made at roughly the same time as the negative by the photographer himself or by a person or procedure satisfactory to the photographer. Occasionally, you will see a time limit of five years placed on what may be considered a vintage print, but the looser “at roughly the same time” is more common. That is because specific dates for exhibition or fine art prints are rarely known; unlike news photographs, they are not stamped with dates.

Let’s consider the 16x20 print from 1948-1954. Is it really worth less than one printed in 1950 if printed by Fein on the same paper and with the same methods? PSA believes the possibility of a 1954 dating makes it worth less than the 1950 print, though there is no possible explanation why.

PSA will never be able to “Type” an exhibition print like the one Fein had by his front door at all, because exhibition prints, lacking time stamps, can only be dated imprecisely. So a 16x20 vintage print from 1948-1954 will sell for one-third of an 8x10 from 1950 certified by PSA. That certainly seems like an opportunity to me.

Charles Conlon never printed for exhibition, but we do know that his house at 189 Alden Place in Englewood, NJ, where he lived during the 1920s and 1930s, was outfitted with darkroom sinks and that Conlon printed there. The Alden Place prints are the highest quality Conlon prints that exist. I own many. The paper was specifically made for contact prints from glass negatives. They greatly surpass the prints Conlon had made by third parties—including presumably the photo department at The Evening Telegram—which vary greatly in quality.

The problem for PSA is that Conlon printed some of his earlier negatives—Ed Walsh’s spitter from 1913, for example—while at Alden Place. So, under the PSA system, a print by Conlon himself from the early 1920s, on the same paper specifically made for contact prints that he would have used in 1913, is not a vintage print; it is a Type 2. Meanwhile, a print made in 1915 by someone in The Evening Telegram’s photo department, printed without detail or any aesthetic consideration because it was for halftone reproduction, is a vintage, or Type 1, print. I believe that the Alden Place prints, because they are by Conlon himself and are of the same type of paper he would have used in 1913 are vintage prints.

As a net buyer, I welcome these anomalies, but the same anomalies also frustrate me as an occasional seller. PSA should adopt the larger photography market’s methodology.