Press Photo and Wire Photo Questions - Newbie

[thecatspajamas]

Originally Posted by billyb

Obc,
I have seen in my cousin's collection of press photos, two sets of doubles that he obtained. Both came out of same newspaper collection. I don't recall if one of the pairs had crop marks and one did not, that would make sense. I do remember one had clipping on back and one did not.
The second pair I just don't recall if their were any differences.

I'm sure it varies depending on the source, but I suspect that is the case with many photos, particularly those produced for in-house use rather than to fulfill orders or subscribers' needs. That way, if you screw one print up when prepping the publication, you would have a back-up on hand rather than having to scramble to find a replacement before press-time. And if you didn't wind up using the duplicate print, why not file it away with the other?

As far as the exact number of prints of any given photo that are in existence, I don't think there is any way to know for sure. For a given news service photo, you would have to know how many subscribers there were for that service at the time (which I have never seen any hard, or even soft, numbers for, has anyone else?), but even that would only give you a starting point and would not account for the numbers that were lost, destroyed in the process of creating the publication, or simply thrown out when the archives became too crowded or the publication folded.