Thread by @CarlaJeanStokes

Great question! Lots to talk about with this one.

First of all, collectors do love to get their hands on vintage prints. In a lot of cases it means you've acquired a print made by the person who also took the negative. Having both would be a serious coup 👇🏻🧵

https://twitter.com/markAcorn/status/1405312620748488708

It's important to note that some photographers almost never made prints from their own negatives. Photojournalists are sometimes a good example of this.

First World War photographers had a hand in developing their negs, but they didn't make prints.

BUT having a 100+ year old print that's A) made with historic materials and B) lived a good long life and C) was printed by the same guy who did all the other prints has something that theorist Walter Benjamin calls the "aura."

It's the same aura that a painting possesses when we see it ourselves, up close.

But I'm getting off track. If you have a neg, why not just make your own contemporary prints?

Depends. Most of the negs made by the most famous photographers in history belong in museums. Sommmmmeetimes a contemporary print will be made. For preservation purposes its likely, today, to be an inkjet print from a high-res digital surrogate.

If you're chilling at the Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs at the Lourvre with a Gustave le Gray wax paper negative from the 1840s ... we're just not gonna make new prints from that.

So what about private collectors? This is completely at their own discretion and will be based on how they've mentally conceptualized their collection, what it is and what it means.

Some would do it, some wouldn't.

If I grabbed some negs off eBay from the First World War era, you can bet I would be making prints from them.

Developing out paper, perhaps with a selenium or sepia toner wouldn't be sooo much different than it was, except papers today have optical brighteners.

A thread on that:

https://twitter.com/CarlaJeanStokes/status/1229443322092982274?s=20

This gets complicated because in history, some photographers would make prints from other peoples' negatives (I could be wrong but its possible Abbott did this with Atget negs).

So now the not vintage print becomes vintage over time because of the fame of the secondary printer.

So, to get our hands on at least something the photographer made, we aim to get vintage prints.

The price of famous photographs is ☝️🏻☝️🏻☝️🏻all the time, so sometimes that's really not an option.

For the most famous of photographers, chances are we won't get our hands on negs.