Summary Of Too Much Of A Good Thing By Richard B. Woodward

“Too Much of a Good Thing”, written by Richard B. Woodward, recounts the Lewis Hine scandal, a time where the American photography market had difficulty proving the authenticity of Hine’s alleged vintage photos. “Materials and Techniques of Man Ray’s Le Violin d’Ingres” by Paul Messier, written ten years after the Hine scandal, explores Man Ray’s photograph Le Violin d’Ingres by employing various connoisseurship skills to gain “valuable insight into the origins of the print.” It is interesting to note the advancement of the tools used to assess the dating of photographs, which in the 1990’s was limited to studying the edges of the photograph for signs of age, but a decade later evolved to include fiber analysis to determine the date of photographic paper.
Woodward begins his essay by explaining that the fine-art photography market contains fewer safeguards to prevent against forgery, as the market is not only smaller than the painting and sculpture markets, but also fairly new. While curators of classical art have an array of tools to assess the originality of a Greek
In his article “Materials and Techniques of Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres”, published ten years after the Lewis Hine scandal, Messier’s connoisseurship skills are beyond the corporate logo, OBAs, and fiber composition of Ray’s print. Messier observes the print under specular light, where he notices minor bulges on the upper left and right corners of the print, which he then uses to compare to the paper and adhesive residues on the reverse of the print. Messier continues to evaluate the print by studying its image tone, sheen, and texture, all of which he describes as warm, also determining that it is “an enlargement from a negative with additional exposure required to apply the