The Future of Type I Photos

[prewarsports]

I will add a couple thoughts with quite a bit of experience. When I started RMY Auctions in 2013, everyone thought that photographs would never be a stand-alone hobby, but just things to throw into major auctions at the end. Now everyone has a photo division, but all they are doing is recycling many of the same images that have been sold and resold numerous times, because nothing new is really hitting the market. Photos were not worth much ten years ago and newspapers were calling to try and dump their photographs. We would go into basements and haul out dusty boxes of photographs just so that newspapers could clear out space in warehouses. Everything was "fresh to the market." In ten years the ENTIRE landscape has shifted. Newspapers and archives not only are holding onto their images, but treating them like gold and re-evaluating them as substantial assets, getting appraisals in the tens of millions of dollars. Most of the newspapers in the country are now part of large groups under a corporate entity. Rather than sell, most are being donated to museums for HUGE tax write offs, or scanned and organized in secure facilities. "The good old days" of ten years ago are a distant memory and we will never go back there again. Very few new archives will ever hit the market.