The Vintage Prints
Posted by Jess Dayuno on July 5th, 2008
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Photo Credit: david_fisher
It was not until the 1970’s when the museums began to collect and present photographs to the public that marketing photography as an art gained real momentum. Before that time, you can only see them in photo books. Oh yes, there were studios, galleries and exhibitions but they were not treated with much importance as an art itself.
In the world of photography, we often heard the words, “vintage print”. However, there were disagreements on how to differentiate the vintage prints from the others. There was even a dispute on how much time will have to pass by between the creations of the negative itself and the printed image. Basically, they consider an image a vintage print when several years had passed already after the negative was made.
When you visit auction houses and museums, they are cataloguing their photographs first by the year the negative was made only to be followed by the year it was printed. It is their only way for them to be clear on the differences between vintage print and modern print.
Naturally, those vintage prints are valued ten times or more even fifty times the modern print are even if they have the same image. They are valued by looking at the paper and the technique that was used to print them. The older and nearer the era that it is to the year the photographer or artist made it are significantly more valuable. Experts believed these negatives are closer to the artist’s hand and mindset during the time it was created.
Photo Credit: °Cisla°
There are popular vintage photographs that can fetch an amount closely to half a million dollars especially if it was signed by the photographer. It is such a difficult thing for ordinary mortals to differentiate old and new since the technology now can create replicas and present it as something so old as well.
Best way to identify the vintage from the modern prints is through the paper used. Museums usually use black light to determine it’s authenticity since before WWII, the photograph papers that was used does not contain new paper ingredients such as brightening agents that will be transparent in black light and a purple tint will reflect in the white areas.