Public enthusiasm for the practice has risen and fallen in waves, but retouching has been an integral part of photography ever since that fateful day in 1846. And just like today, photographers and cultural critics of the 19th and 20th centuries debated the ethics of retouching. Photographers and retouching specialists would scrape their film with knives, draw or paint on top of it, and even paste multiple negatives together to create a single print.
Retouching has therefore been around almost as long as photography itself, but instead of taking place on a computer, as it does now, it originally took place on the negative. In the positive print, the place where the fifth friar had stood became white sky.
Jones, or an associate, didn’t like the way this fifth friar was interrupting the scene, and so blotted out the figure on the paper negative using some India ink. Jones had taken a photograph of five Capuchin friars on a rooftop in Malta, but while four of the friars were clustered together talking in a group, the fifth hovered a few feet behind them, framed awkwardly against the sky. Just five years later, in 1846, the first known act of photographic retouching was performed by a Welsh colleague of Talbot’s named Calvert Richard Jones, or perhaps by one of Jones’s associates. In 1841, the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot patented the calotype-the first practical photographic process to create a negative that could generate multiple copies.
HENRY PHOTOJOB SERIES
This is the first installment in a short series of articles on photo manipulation in the days before computers.
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