As an experienced collector, Stephen Foster knew he had something big when he got the call.
It was from PSA. They wanted his credit card so they could charge him another $4,000.
He pulled out his card and read off the numbers.
"I knew it was going to be something good," Foster said.
In 2022, Foster purchased a photo of the famous "Raising of the Flag on Iwo Jima," the image of six U.S. Marines lifting the American flag toward the end of World War II. The photo had been autographed by photographer Joe Rosenthal, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945 for snapping the image.
"To a great bunch of fighting men on Iwo Jima, from Joe Rosenthal, A.P.," the autograph said.
"I'd obviously seen the photograph many times, but the autograph and the words written just touched me in a way that I wanted to buy it," Foster said.
He didn't think of it as something of tremendous monetary value, but he paid somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000 for the photo — Foster can't recall the exact number.
It remained on his desk in his second home in Fresno, California, until earlier this year, when his friend Rick Mirigian came into the office.
Mirigian is known as a boxing promoter, but he's also a legend in the modern card hobby. More than two decades ago, he sold the most valuable modern cards for unheard of prices — at least back then. They're worth tens of millions today.
Always a prospector, Mirigian had found great arbitrage of recent in Type 1 photos, defined as photos taken from the original negative and published within two years of the image being shot. Take a photo that isn't slabbed by PSA as Type 1, get it declared as Type 1, and the potential is there to go for as much as 100 times the original price paid.
"I told Stephen I thought it had a chance to be a Type 1," Mirigian said.
The photo was in a Beckett slab, but Beckett doesn't authenticate photo type. The only thing Beckett was authenticating was that the signature indeed belonged to Rosenthal.
The first inkling of a Type 1 photo usually has to do with the extensive stamping on the back. This back was blank.
But Mirigian said he thought the paper it was printed on looked like it was from the 1940s.
Foster was convinced by Mirigian to send it to PSA, paying about $500 for the authentication ... and then came the second call.
When the photo came back, it was exactly what Mirigian suspected: It was indeed a Type 1.
Not only that, but it was one of only three Type 1 photos of "Iwo Jima" that PSA had authenticated, and the only one that was signed.
“We were excited at PSA because, unlike many of the dozens upon dozens of Type 2s and 3s and even 4s we have received over the years, this one was different because of the paper stock employed by AP and Rosenthal at that time,” Henry Yee, head of PSA photo authentication services, told cllct. “It wasn't until it was examined and analyzed in our lab with our e-scopes and lights and matched the exemplars on file that were we able to confirm that this is only the third Type 1 from the period.”
Yee said a Type 1 photo of Iwo Jima has few rivals in the photo collecting world.
“The only two war photographs that would even challenge this, in my opinion, would be 1862 'Lincoln at Antietam' by Alexander Gardner, or 1936 'Falling Soldier' by Robert Capa,” Yee said. “But neither one is as iconic or asthetically pleasing, and I don't think either would fetch six figures at this time.”
"I had thought about holding on to it, but after spending another $4,000, I thought why not take it to auction?" Foster said.
Goldin Auctions was the right place, as it had had the most success of any auction house selling Type 1s, including some of Mirigian's better turnarounds.
The auction house put it in its Goldin 100, which closed Saturday night. When it ended, the photo closed at $103,090, a record for a wartime photo. It surpassed the $93,000 paid for a Type 1 of Robert Sargent's "Into the Jaws of Death," which was taken eight months before Iwo Jima on D-Day in 1944.
Foster was obviously thrilled and laughs at the fact that the photo sat on his desk for a couple years. Even at a $2,000 price tag and $4,500 for authentication, Foster realized more than 15 times his investment.
Even though he was a sophisticated collector, he thought of the signed photo as nothing more than a beautiful piece. Saturday night, it turned out to be way more than that.
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct.com and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectible market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.