Originally Posted by benjulmag
Clayton,
Forensic testing is a negative process, which means it does not say what something is but rather what something is not. So if the testing shows an item contains substances that were not in existence at the time the item was to have been created, then it must be a fake. But that is quite different from saying it is real. How do we know a skilled forger, knowledgeable in how items were made, could not have recreated the process in current times using materials that were commercially available in the period when the item was to have originated? In the case at hand, Mr. Messier says the photo is consistent with a 19th century albumen photo. That certainly is nice to know because had he said it is inconsistent, then case closed, the item must be a fake. But to me that says little because I never thought the image was not albumen. Any forger with half a brain would know for a fake to pass muster, it had to be an albumen photo. Why? Because, as Mr. Messier has shown, to a person with knowledge of 19th photography, determining the type of photo is not difficult. But why couldn't a forger take a genuine Williamson mount, create an albumen copy of the LOC image, and adhere it to the mount? If that was to be done then presto, you will have created a CdV in the same fashion that Willimason did in his studio. Far fetched you say? Well given the simplicity of doing it and the tremendous payoff if it passes muster, why is this possibility not plausible? This hobby has seen fakes of so many kinds. Why then not fake CdVs?
The reason for my concern is because not only has a genuine CdV of this image never before been seen (the LOC version is not techically a CdV because of the size of its mount), but of much more serious concern is that this image reflects a degradation in resolution that IMO raises the most serious questions whether it was printed from the same negative as produced the LOC image. Resolution is different from contrast. Prints generated from the same negative can and do vary widely in contrast. Think of N172s, say. A card of a particular player can come with crisp contrast or instead appear very light. But that has nothing to do with resolution, or the detail that can be seen in the image. If on a scale of 1 to 10 the LOC image is a 10 in terms of resolution, I would call the Saco River image a 5. That to me is an enormous difference, and not only have I never before seen such a difference in images generated from the same negative, I don't understand how the printing process could cause such a precipitous drop. Troy offers as an explanation that perhaps the vignette process used by the studio caused resolution degradation that reached into player images themselves. To this point all I can say is that I would want someone knowledgeable in vignette photography to corroborate that as a reasonable explaination. In the absence of such an explanation, there certainly is reasonable doubt the image is real, and the additional tests Mr. Messier describes should be undertaken.
To anticipate a question, why must these additional tests be conclusive if forensic testing is, as I have said, a negative proces? The answer is that they are not conclusive, but they would substantially reduce the chances the image is not real because the more layers of testing one does, the greater the difficulty for a forger to be so skilled as to create something that passes all known forensic testing, and too the greater the attendant expense. Is it theoretically possible, yes, but as a practical matter, in most cases unlikely.
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