Are Type I Photos The Only Safe Bet In This Hobby?

[sphere and ash]

Originally Posted by lumberjack

Paul,
I've been talking with my photo guru about these different types of paper. Cranes Kid Finish is stationary paper. Cranes, by the way, makes paper for US currency. Now, if you can get find a really sharp chemist and borrow a paper mill for a couple of hours in the middle of the night, well, the possibilities are endless....I once worked in a paper mill, this is the sort of thing we used to talk about.

Strathmore 500 is drawing paper. Maybe both would work for exotic 19th century stuff, I don't know how they would apply to the 20th century. I'm fighting above my weight class, here.

Platinotype, which was produced in France until 1924, was made as a speciality paper from the 1990s until about 2008. Platinotype is the real deal and I would encourage anybody who is ready to go into the counterfeit photo business (if my ideas about finding an amoral chemist and and empty paper mill don't work out) to try this stuff. Problem being, you can't fake the patina. This is the real sticking point, right?

Vintage paper is available on eBay, but you just don't know if it will work until you try it.

All modern white paper has been treated with bleach and would be detected with a black light. It sounds as though platinotype is unbleached.

Lastly, you have more hands on experience that I, and I'm just talking about 20th century photographers (like Conlon), but the paper used throughout the dead ball era was very thin. Is any of the paper you mentioned of that thickness. If a photo passed the black light test, could it pass a micrometer or calipers?

I still think it would be easier to fake "Night Watch" than Cobb sliding into Jimmy Austin. But, hey, we know guys who were buying ink jet photos in the belief they were vintage prints. Everybody, do your homework.
lumberjack

I was arguing against the idea, raised earlier in this thread, that there was something about albumen that made it impossible to reproduce. Having printed in albumen about twenty years ago, that didn’t seem right to me. You just have to experiment until you find the right paper.

There was a major scandal in the photography market fifteen years ago when people began to question the authenticity of Lewis Hine photographs originating from the collection of Hine scholars Walter and Naomi Rosenblum. Some 500 prints were sold as vintage, meaning that they were purported to have been printed and signed by Hine. Tests of the photographic paper, however, revealed that it contained optical brightening agents in the baryta layer that were not introduced until 1955. Since Hine died in 1940, the presence of OBAs meant that Walter Rosenblum might have printed the Hines himself and signed Hine’s name to the posthumous prints. It is hard to convey how shocking this possibility was—the Rosenblums were giants among photography scholars.

The problem with faking a Conlon now is not unlike the problem the Rosenblums allegedly confronted. Conlon died before OBAs were introduced in photographic papers. To forge a Conlon, you need a paper without OBAs. It seems to me inevitable that someone wiłl make one available.