Old Boston Photo -Real or Fake?

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Posted By: Dan Bretta

What do you guys think?

http://tinyurl.com/2ebhqa

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Posted By: davidcycleback

Looks fake to me. At the least, the mount appears not to be original.

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Posted By: Dan Bretta

That's all I needed to hear David. I stayed away thinking fake, but it's nice to hear your hunches confirmed by an expert.

Thanks.

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Posted By: davidcycleback

Half the seller's description is about the frame, and if you look at the back the nails appear
brand new, bright and shinny.

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Posted By: Judge Dred (Fred)

The item description included the following:

I do accept returns

That's like a free pass, the only expense would be the postage back and forth if you didn't want it. That's not too bad. If it's real (which would make it pretty valuable) then it's worth the gamble... it's ebay... sometimes you've just got to pull the trigger... with that said, I have no opinion on the picture. Better scans could help.

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Posted By: Dan Bretta

You could say he's got a loophole in that with this auction as you would have to "alter" this to be able to authenticate it.

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Posted By: Jeremy

I found the same photo in Sotheby's Halper auction. Halper's was much larger & shared the same flaws as the Ebay item, which lead me to believe it was somehow copied from the Sotheby catalog.

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Posted By: Mike

Along with "Old Cardboard", I specialize in pre war baseball photos, amd antiques. I have, I suppose 70 pre war wire, and news photos. I have purchased from Henry Yee, and others of the like. I have collected old baseball photos for many years.

Who cares about the frame anyway? Old small frames are worth about $10 bucks. I usually toss them, when they get here.

The scan makes it difficult to know for sure, but if the colors are anywhere near what they appear to be, it looks like reprint. Something just isn't right. But if the seller is honest, and the price is right, take a shot. But after arrival, take it to a reputable photo expert and ask him what age the print paper is. 19th century print paper is no longer used, and is very easy to authenticate. Good luck. Nice picture though.

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Posted By: davidcycleback

Beyond that the frame isn't terribly nice looking, the problem with frames is it make everything
about 10x more expensive to ship. Obviously, if the thing is small or the frame is original to
the item, that can be a different story. But this type of photo wouldn't have originally come in
a frame.

I think it was REA that said frames were removed from auction paintings because with the saved shipping
cost the winner could buy a new frame.

Unless this item was glued in, it wouldn't be difficult to remove the nails, inspect the photo and
reseal it. As noted the nails appear brand new and the seller describes the back as being a piece
of barn wood. No one's tampering with an Egyptian tomb by removing the back.

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Posted By: ramram

Would be a steal if it was authentic, but odds are against it. Without having it in hand or seeing pics of it without the frame it's hard to tell. However, having dealt with a large number of albumens, it doesn't quite seem to have the right look. Vintage cards are not the only target in the area of forgers anymore. There are a lot of vintage images making the rounds now as well. This is one I've seen before. Most of the fakes were showing up with the early negro league picks at first. Now they've moved on. They try to age them and put them in vintage frames or frames that they think are vintage. The back of that frame doesn't look far removed from the tree it came from.

Rob M.

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Posted By: Dan Bretta

I've been burned in the past on ebay photos and I've also gotten some steals - I won this auction the other night and I can't even really see the photos, but I found the auction with 47 seconds before it ended and I acted fast - and I got them very cheap. I'll post better photos when they get here, but I really have no idea what I have here. It's supposedly two baseball teams - I can see one fellow with a baseball bat, but it looks like everyone is dressed in everyday clothing.

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Posted By: dan mckee

FAKE

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Posted By: Corey R. Shanus

A number of years ago I had this same image and remember it being consideraly larger, which is consistent with an earlier post about the one in the Halper sale. Assuming those other ones were larger, then this one could not be a first generation image unless the technique of reducing prints from negatives was in commercial usage in the 1880's, and I am not aware of that being the case. Assuming that is correct, then the only way this image could be period is if it was a period photo of a photo, which I think very unlikely. And even if by some miracle it was a period piece, being a second generation image, its value would be considerably reduced.