PSA photo authentication - a suggestion

[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

[Runscott]

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

True, Lance, but some of the 'tools' are incredible items, just because of their lifetime of press experience:

[Runscott]

Was that scan big enough for you?

[thecatspajamas]

Originally Posted by Runscott

True, Lance, but some of the 'tools' are incredible...

Hey now, let's not get into personal judgements

And yes, that Wheat photo is incredible. Very nice!

[Runscott]

Rhys recently auctioned a very similar one of Alexander - same mounting, stamps, writing, enhancements on the front. Makes me wonder how many more of these there are? What a set it would make to have 5-10 star players.

[thecatspajamas]

So do you think they were produced as "Cabinets" by Conlon and then used for publication, or were they mounted for some reason in the process of being used for publication? (My guess would be the former, given the stamping is on the back of the mount, not on a photo that was then mounted, but not having handled very many cabinets, thought I would throw the question out there).

Also interesting (to me at least) is that this particular image does not appear to be represented among the Conlon Archive negatives that The Sporting News purchased from Conlon. At least, it's not among those presented on the website that Rogers had made for the collection (and being that there are personal shots of unknown relatives of Conlon presented there, I kind of doubt they would have held back an image of a known player). Makes me wonder how many of Conlon's negatives were lost, stolen, sold, given away, or otherwise removed from the archive over the years before Rogers bought them.

[Runscott]

Originally Posted by thecatspajamas

So do you think they were produced as "Cabinets" by Conlon and then used for publication, or were they mounted for some reason in the process of being used for publication? (My guess would be the former, given the stamping is on the back of the mount, not on a photo that was then mounted, but not having handled very many cabinets, thought I would throw the question out there).

I don't know - the Conlon stamp on the back initially confused me, because I wouldn't expect him to glue a print to a mount.

One of many possible scenarios: Conlon stamped the original print (or wrote his notes and name on it) and then sent the photo to a news agency. The news agency mounted it for ease of marking up, covering the original Conlon stamp (or notes), then returned to Conlon. Conlon put his stamp on the back and it later ended up with 'the Sporting News'.

[drcy]

I've seen old cardboard mounted news photos before. Rare and not sure why they did it, but I've seen them before. If Conlon's stamp is on back, I assume he did it.

[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