The retouched reproduction master

At first glance, our object of the month looks more like a drawing than a photograph. In fact, it is a silver gelatin print on baryta paper that was manually reworked after photographic development. Visible retouching paint emphasizes individual contours, smooths surfaces, and alters tonal gradations. The print thus documents a step in the analog production process of fashion photography that usually remained hidden.

The retouching suggests that the print served as a reproduction template for printing. Before digitalization, photographs in prepress were often retouched by hand to facilitate later reproduction and enable a more precise implementation of the photographic original in magazine or advertising printing. The reverse side of the mounted print provides further clues about the context of its creation. The fashion shown comes from the Norwegian fashion company "Hagbarth Schjøtt A/S," and the fabric from the North German textile company NINO.

As an archival object, the retouched print offers a glimpse behind the scenes of fashion photography. It does not show the finished image, but an intermediate state in the creation process – a working tool on which the material traces of analog image editing have been preserved to this day. Thus, the object impressively documents that image creation in analog photography extended far beyond the moment of capture and only received its final form through the collaboration of photography, retouching, and reproduction.