PSA photo authentication - a suggestion

[Frozen in Time]

Originally Posted by prewarsports

There is a pretty direct correlation between the popularity of the subject and condition of press photos in general. In the NEA archive I was able to dig through, there were thousands of high grade images from pre 1930 but they are almost always guys that the paper might have received in the mail as part of a group of images and then never used the photo. The big names got used for stories and then reused over and over again being taken in and out of folders for 100 years. The Grover Lowdermilks of the World just sat there like the unpopular toys from "Toy Story" all alone and remained in amazing condition.

Some archives are just beat to hell and it has to do more with storage than anything. If the paper used open folders than they are almost always in bad shape, but if they used self enclosing envelopes for their subjects than aside from some corner bumping (sliding the photos in and out) they can still be found in immaculate condition!

Originally Posted by thecatspajamas

This also correlates to what Craig was saying about photos coming from players' personal collections being in better condition. Often those were placed in albums, file cabinets, trunks, or "archived" in some other way and sat untouched for decades. They were treated as keepsakes, not tools of the trade. You tend to expect that tools are going to show more wear than keepsakes

Yes , that was exactly my point. In the case of one sportswriter, I bought all the Mantle photos in his archive directly from his family. These dated from 1951 to 1957 (the sportswriter retired in 1958).

When I went to the house of the sportswriter's daughter, she showed me his entire archive - a series of 5 old filing cabinets + some other stuff in about 20 large boxes. She opened one drawer of one filing cabinet to show me where the Mantle photos were - she said she had looked at all the contents of the filing cabinets and boxes and these were all the Mantle photos she could find. They were in a large, fading, reddish color "envelope" that was in between several other similar envelopes, all oriented with their long axis horizontal. She said these were all original to her father and that all the writing was her father's.

Within the large reddish envelope there were 2 blue folders each with mickey mantle-yankees written on the outside,and one whitish folder with just what looks like "1/2" written on the outside. The "1/2" folder had mostly wire photos cut down to show just Mantle, I believe this is what is now called a vertical file. The 2 other folders had 5X7, 6X8, 7X9 and 8X10 photos of the Mick - mostly Type I's. The fronts of virtually all of these were clean, almost pristine, the backs of most had a news agency or photographer's stamp and sometimes a date stamp. Interestingly, almost all had the paper caption ripped off (all that remained was a small brown piece ) and in the sportswriter's handwriting a summary and date of the photo info.

So, although I'm not sure what the exact function of these photos was for this sportswriter, I can say that the overwhelming majority of the photos that I got from this one (and, as I mentioned in my earlier e-mail, from other sportswriters, photographers and estates of players) have always been in much better shape than those I've bought that originated from newspaper or news agency archives.

Craig