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The portrait studio was a serious small business in 1962 America. Every town had at least one, the photographer was a tradesman with real technical training, and the…
Prints deteriorate through several separate processes, some driven by light, some by chemistry and some by whatever they were stored in. Here are fifteen.
1. Colour Prints Are Made of…
Light leaves every point of a subject in all directions. A lens collects some of that and reconverges it, and the entire craft is built on the properties and failures…
The test is simple and nobody applies it at the time: which of these will still mean something when the trip is a decade old. It is rarely the famous…
There is a category of historical evidence that is systematically misleading in a way nobody notices, and early photographs are the clearest case.
A photograph feels like direct evidence. It…
The single most useful realisation is that the famous view has been photographed by everyone who came before you, from the same place, and you cannot improve on it by…