The Future of Type I Photos

[prewarsports]

There is still a lot of good stuff out there in private collections, like the stuff Hunt's is selling for the Mathewson family. I was mostly referring to archives. I remember pulling a D-Day folder from a midwest archive in 2015 and there were three "Jaws of Death" photographs in there. Now they are $30,000-$100,000 each but at the time I remember thinking, "cool those are worth about $1000 each and we found three." The thrill of wondering what is in the next folder or box and getting to do that from 2013-2020 was awesome and I miss it, but the prices have gotten too high. I am now getting most of our for RMY, which is still 95% "fresh to the market", from people who bought archives decades ago and not the institutions themselves, and they all keep up on current market trends.

I will add one more insight that people can take for what it is. Either the top end of the sports photo market is overpriced (mostly card images and early Babe Ruth) or the non-sports market is underpriced (which is what I believe). Time will tell. In the entire photo industry NOTHING outside "art photography" is worth more than sports photography. I was told once by an old time collector "never buy who is in the photo, only buy who took the photo." The right Mickey Mantle photo from 1951 is worth more than any subject driven image beside the famous Billy the Kid tintype. This is a bit odd. I talk to people all the time who only see sports photos in relation to baseball cards and do not realize how the values are inflated in regard to literally every other aspect of photography in the world. You could dream up a scenario where the greatest image of anyone outside of sports is put on a shelf (say Edison in his lab inventing the modern light bulb or the Titanic hitting the iceberg from a hidden camera on deck) and there would be hundreds of images from the genre of sports worth much much more.

It will be interesting to see how the next ten years play out.