International News Photos

[thecatspajamas]

Scott, second posting of the pic shows up fine, for me at least.

I'm not as familiar with Culver's stamping styles, and they are unfortunately not covered in Yee/Fogel's book, but it looks to me like there are at least 3 distinct stampings on the back of your photo (possibly four, depending on what is underneath the 2-strip masking label). It looks to me like, of the stampings visible, the Culver Pictures, Inc. stamping with the marked-out address was applied first, along with the "This picture is loaned for..." text block underneath (possibly the two were on the same stamp block, though I can't quite tell if the alignment is there by eyeballing the scan). At some point, Culver moved or changed addresses, and the stamping with phone number at the bottom was added. Research into the history of Culver (which I have not done) would help to give a date range to both of those stamps, even absent from other dated examples to compare to. Finally, the "DEACCESSIONED" stamping at the top was applied in 1992. Judging by the blanks left in the stamp to be filled in by hand, that stamp was likely used over a number of years for whenever photos were removed or sold from the archive, and in this case could be definitively dated to February of 1992. All stamping aside, the original cabinet card is commonly known as an 1895 Newsboy Cabinet (ACC #N566) which was issued in the mid-1890's as evidenced by the logo and number on the front of the card/photo (and now that I think about it, probably has advertising on the back underneath the masking label rather than another Culver stamp). It would have been picked up by Culver at some time later and added to their archive of images as a nice example of an early Ward photo. This practice too was not uncommon, though their claiming of rights for the photo to be used in advertising is pretty bold considering the source of the image, and probably would not have been enforceable.

So like with any stamped news photo, you have to proceed backwards through the various stampings and markings to get to the earliest one (in this case, not the stamping of the news agency, but the original Newsboy commercial markings on the cabinet card itself) to date when the photo (print) was produced. Clearly, the 1992 date, being the most recent marking on the photo, is not the date the photo (print) was produced (as you said yourself). Even disregarding the original Newsboy markings though, I don't think this is a case of a photo that was sitting in Culver's archives unstamped for 100 years, only to be pulled out and stamped in 1992 when it was removed from the archive. If you further researched the other Culver stampings, I believe you would find that the earlier stamp was applied much much earlier than 1992, most likely when Culver added the photo to their archives.