The face can be anyone’s. What puts a photograph in a year is the object it is: how big the chemist printed it, whether its edge is deckled or its corners rounded, whether it is sepia, black and white, faded colour or glossy colour, what is stamped on its back, and — from the 1980s — the orange date burnt into the corner. This is the research behind the Photo Lab. Every entry is workshop practice unless a source is named.
Nineteenth-century prints are mounted on card (the carte de visite of the 1860s, the cabinet card of the 1870s–1900s) and albumen-toned; the postcard-sized print of the 1900s–30s is sepia or black and white; from the 1930s to the 1950s a snapshot is a small contact print with a white border and a deckle edge; the 1960s bring the square print of the Instamatic and the first common colour; the 1970s round the corners; the 1980s print 3½ × 5 inches in colour with the orange date in the corner; from about 1990 the 4 × 6 glossy, borderless, with the lab’s paper branding on the back; from the 2000s a digital print with a lab code. The studio picks the size, surface and tone from the year and the country.
| Years | What a print looks like |
|---|---|
| to 1905 | Albumen: a warm purplish brown, often faded to yellow at the edges. |
| 1905–1930 | Gelatine silver, sepia-toned for the album; black and white for the newspaper. |
| 1930–1965 | Black and white, glossy or matt. Colour snapshots exist from the 1950s but are dear and rare. |
| 1965–1985 | Colour becomes the default; the prints of these decades have since faded to magenta and lost their blues. |
| 1985 on | Colour, stable; black and white is a choice. |
Hand-tinted. From about 1900 to 1960 a studio would colour a black-and-white portrait by hand: thin oils or dyes washed over a warm print — a blue behind the head, a flush on the cheeks, a green at the foot — never quite inside the lines. It is a portrait or an enlargement that is tinted, not a snapshot, and once colour film is cheap the trade shrinks to wedding and memorial portraits. Workshop practice; how late it lasted varies by country.
Three generations: the roll-film print of 1948–63 (peeled, coated with a swab, a sepia-brown then black and white), the pack-film print from 1963 (peel-apart, colour from the start), and the square integral print from 1972 — the white frame with the wide foot that is what everyone now means by the word. Integral film sold first in America and Britain; on much of the Continent it is a late-1970s arrival.
The automatic booth is the Photomaton of 1925 (New York; London and Paris by 1928): a strip of four (sometimes eight) poses, black and white until the colour machines of the mid-1970s. The strip is about 40 mm wide. Smaller and older machines give three poses; the sheet of four in two rows belongs to the colour and then the digital machines of the 1980s on. Workshop practice.
| Country | The size asked for |
|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 1½ × 2 in to the 1990s; 35 × 45 mm after. Grey background to about 2008, then a light plain ground. |
| United States | 2 × 2 in throughout; a white ground from about 2000. |
| The Continent | 4 × 5 cm into the 1980s, the Schengen 35 × 45 mm after; white grounds from the mid-2000s. |
| Russia | 3 × 4 cm in the Soviet decades; 35 × 45 mm from the 1990s. |
Photographs on passports begin with the war: Britain in 1915, most of Europe by 1920.
A roll of 35 mm cut into strips and printed by contact on one sheet: six strips of six on the Continental 24 × 30 cm paper, seven strips of five on British and American 8 × 10 inch (six frames are 228 mm, wider than the sheet) — the film’s own edge markings (the maker, the type and the frame numbers) showing between the frames, and the chosen frames ringed in grease pencil. The Leica generation’s object, from the mid-1930s; a press photographer’s desk has one on it into the 1990s.
The chemist’s developing-and-printing envelope: the lab’s name in a band of colour, the customer’s name in pen, the order number in red, the film and the number of prints, when it will be ready (a weekday until the 1970s, an hour from the minilab boom of the 1980s), a pocket for the negatives, the PAID stamp at an angle. The studio prints the Brand Room’s firm as the lab.
The lab, the film and the paper makers are invented (Argentol, Velotone, Bromex, Lumichrome); no real maker’s back-print or instant-film brand is reproduced. The picture is the user’s own, read in the browser and never sent anywhere, or an illustrated silhouette. No face is generated. The dates on this page are the real history the objects are drawn against.
The year the orange date imprint became common on British prints (the studio uses 1983); the first colour booths outside America; when each continental country moved to the 35 × 45 mm passport photograph. Open questions for the Archive.
Every date on this page is built into the studio: pick a country and a year and the object takes the size, the surface and the tone of that year — and the Checks panel says what an audience could catch.
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