Ikey kindly sent me an email detailing why this isn't a real photo as follows;
Quote:
It is an ordinary postcard, featuring an image reproduced from a photograph.
I'm guessing that it is a half-tone; under magnification, can you see tiny dots?
Real Photo Post Cards were produced on (wait for it) real photograph paper, that is, paper with an emulsion that, once exposed to light, reacted to form the image. For some decades, this was pretty much a onesy-twosy kind of thing, with the photographer often scratching some sort of descriptive caption onto the image.
They often age badly, eg, if they are exposed to light, heat, etc.
Post-WW1, while the US went the way of those ugly "white border" cards that offered eye-bending mis-registered color images, some of the major European publishers went to mass-produced photo post cards (I call them RPP2s, but that's me), wherein a continuous roll of real photographic paper passed thru a 'press' where it was exposed to the same negative, again & again.
These RPP2s can be LOVELY; the photographers dragged these massive Hasselblad cameras around - the negatives were on the order of 10" by 16", if memory serves - and the resolution of the printed images was fantastic. These postcards were common thru the 1950s; towards the end, you can find them colorized.
Anyway, what you've got is a "postcard, featuring a gruesome image reproduced from a photograph"
I have no doubt he's correct but what I don't know is if this is the common understanding in the
ebay 'Real Photo" category? There are 158,000 postcards listed and I suspect the actual real photo postcards are a small subset of the 158,000 cards. If these postcards are listed incorrectly I would happily end the auction and return them to their owner.
Posted 01/21/2019 12:04 pm
