When and how do you decide to have photos PSA-certified?

[lumberjack]

This business of classifying an image according to when it was printed, is something unique to sports (baseball, really) photography.

If you are involved with art photography (FSA, Paul Strand, Lewis Hine, you get the idea), there is no mention of type.

Ansel Adams shot "Moonrise" in 1941 and continued to print that image until his death in 1984. Nobody in the history of Earth has ever said, "Oh, Ansel did that in 1975, that's a Type II, I don't want that."

Today, you can get copies of "Moonrise" from the people who manage the estate of Ansel Adams. The prices of the Adams photos vary according to quality. You can buy FSA photos from the Library of Congress,
which are inexpensive.

When HYee and Fogel did there pioneering work on sports photography, an arbitrary date was set for what constituted a "vintage" photography. It wasn't selected out of thin air, but close enough. Their book was not a price guide, they were just looking for clarity.

UPI, the eventual incarnation of International News, was printing quality images from the original negatives well into the '60s. The Brown Bros. photos, which we now have a glut of thanks to Lelands, reprinted photos from the original negatives for decades.

With the Browns, we have no idea, even with the use of back stamps, when this stuff was cranked out. UPI is the same way; maybe you can be off by a decade. It matters most if you are speculating or are a photo maven.

The later copies can go for ten cents on the dollar, which is weird because they are often cleaner copies.

Perhaps the standards will, in time, change.

Ask yourself, why are you doing this, to make money or because you like the picture.