Posthumous Prints and 2007Posthumous prints are prints made after a photographer's death. These Lewis Hine prints were made about 23 years after his death. They are, however, silver-in-gelatin, fiber based, archivally processed. The paper, an Eastman Kodak double weight paper was long ago dropped from their line. It was selected in order to closely match the grey scales of the negatives. Prints made in the first quarter of the 20th century were mostly on quite thin, single weight papers. Considering today's times in the early 21st century and the fact that the largest photographic companies in the world, some having filed bankruptcy, have either cut back dramatically or even totally stopped production of silver-halide photographic papers. Therefore these photographs will only continue to become more rare. The probability of the negatives ever being printed again on silver-halide paper is doubtful at best. Those negatives remaining have already been "digitized" and most likely all future prints, if any, would be produced by toners and inks, if at all. In today's world where images are instantly transmitted from continent to continent with the speed of light, digitized images are far less costly to distribute having been converted from silver metal to bits, bytes, 0s and 1s. One must acknowledge today that with digital imagery there is no real image that one can hold in the hand until it is printed to some physical medium. Once thriving "wet process" darkrooms are rapidly disappearing—being replaced by computer driven, daylight operated mechanical printers of all sorts sitting on desktops. The "wet process" in a majority of colleges is now being batched with "alternative" processes, i.e., collodian, palladium, platinum, etc. Thanks to the digital era, silver-gelatin photographs have become extremely collectible! As the song goes, "The times they are a chang'n!" so goes the world.
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