The concept of the "vintage print," as used in the sale of fine arts photography, is artificial; it's a gimmick, if you will, intended to boost the value of a photographer's oeuvre. It was formulated by the galleries back in the 1970's when the sales of photographic artwork began to take off. At the time, the problem getting high prices for photography was that printing was viewed as a mechanical process in which photos could be uniformly reproduced endlessly from any negative. This in contrast to the one-of-a-kind painting, or even an engraving whose plates would begin to detoriate after the twentieth or so impression.
In response, the vintage print is defined as one printed by the photographer withing six months of the date he/she took the photograph. That sounds great, but -- as any photographer will tell you -- it's too problematic to be really useful. I, for one, recall George Tice telling a class at Parsons how long he had taken to realize that one of his most famous images was best printed by deeply burning in both the right and left sides of the vertical format.
In my own work, I've come back often to negatives I shot years ago and have seen in them new detail, or else realized a given photo would be much more dramatic if cropped more closely.
The artistry in b&w printing lies in the ability to extract from the negative sufficient information to form an image pleasing to the photographer's own aesthetic.
Nevertheless, having said all that, I intend to begin selling vintage prints from my website. These traditionally processed silver cholorbromide prints will be limited editions in the sense that, in most cases, only four or five have been printed within a six month period of the dates on which the images were created. I feel that traditional b&w prints processed in a wet darkroom will only increase in value as the materials and supplies necessary to their production grow ever more scarce in a digital era.
