In the analogue era, press photographs were not only final images but also working documents. Before publication, a photograph passed through the hands of editors, layout artists and retouchers. Pencil lines indicated where the image should be cropped, while paint or marker was used to cover parts of the scene. People who were irrelevant to the accompanying article were sometimes crossed out or painted over, allowing the focus to fall entirely on the person the story was about.
The photographs in this exhibition still carry the traces of that editorial process. They reveal a stage of image production that usually remained invisible and show that photography is never simply a matter of recording reality, but also of selection and interpretation.
These interventions also give the images an unexpected visual quality. The combination of the photographic image and the hand-drawn markings creates a second, graphic layer. At the same time, each intervention makes the object unique. What were once purely functional press images have thus become singular artefacts that, despite their journalistic origins, can also be viewed in an artistic context.
Depth Of Field (DOF) is an Amsterdam based gallery dealing in nineteenth and early twentieth century photographs. The gallery is founded by Wendela Hubrecht and Joris Jansen and is based in the Hazenstraat 28 in Amsterdam.
John Devos
johndevos.photo (a) gmail.com
