Who's ready for a #thread on the materiality of photographs!? If it sounds thrilling, it's because it is 
I recently purchased the above photographic print on eBay. When we look at the image, we see a very memorable: "Battle of Pilckem Ridge. Stretcher bearers struggle in mud up to their knees to carry a wounded man to safety near Boesinghe," 1 August 1917, by Ernest Brooks.
However, when we look at the back (an essential, and honestly thrilling, pastime for all photo-historians) we see that this particular print was actually run in the Sunday Telegraph in 1966.
I normally always buy vintage (ie. made during the war or very quickly after) prints. But I couldn't resist this one (and it was a comparative bargain). AND this particular print is a great lesson in materiality.
It's hard to tell by the scan, but this print is comparatively huge. Much bigger than a vintage FWW print made by the Ministry of Information (Britain) or the Canadian War Records Office (Canada). Below: the Pilckem Ridge photograph with a David McLellan print for comparison.
There is also a big difference between photographic paper from 1918 to that of the 1960s. Optical brighteners were introduced to photographic papers in the 1950s - meaning you'll really never see a truly white white in a print before that.
(Above are British vintage prints ca. 1918 with the ca. 1966 photograph, taken hastily on my office floor).
We can also compare these to black and white gelatin silver prints made in the darkroom ca. 2014, in which you can see truly black and white tones. It's probably that the 1966 photograph had better contrast when it was printed more than 50 years ago.
The 1966 photograph also features a fairly common facet of photos printed specifically for use in the press: applied media to retouch the scene and make it better for printing on newsprint. (You'll also see that I didn't quite match up both sides of the print when I scanned it)
In the above, the retouching seems to consist of fixing up some of the mud, and outlining the soldiers' helmets. However, I've seen cases of entire skies being painted in, and entire soldiers being painted out.
Finally, if the verso stamp "Sunday Telegraph 8 May 1966" wasn't present, the handwritten Q 5935 would be a dead giveaway.
All British official photographers were given an individual letter to code their negatives with. Ernest Brooks' negs were all given alphanumeric C.#### negative numbers, as he created them.
John Warwick Brooke's are D, David McLellan's are L, and Thomas Keith Aitkens are M. In New Zealand, Henry Armitage Sanders' photographers have H, while all Canadians' are O.
It wasn't until after the First World War ended that some of Britain's official photographers joined the team at the Imperial War Museum and helped sort out the giant body of work they'd created. At this time, all the photographers were re-numbered with "Q".
So, if you see a Q-numbered photograph, you'll know right away it was made after the war.
As you'll see from above, checking out the paper, and viewing the size of the print can help determine HOW long after the war, and if you examine for media applied to the image, you could take a guess as to how it was used.
And, finally, I can't stress enough: photographs are objects. They cannot be defined simply by the image they bear. They have a front and a back. They take up space. They have lives - which (obviously) is, to me, endlessly fascinating. Happy Monday!
