Newspaper photography creates narrative and demands the cooperation of the photographer, the editor and the subject. This practice was born out of traditions that stretched back to early news photographs which were re-interpreted by an engraver before the image could be published. A retoucher employed ink and paint to bring out salient details and to provide cropping instructions to the newspaper designers. The edited news photograph was not intended to exist today - it was only to be known through reproductions, a practice that conceals its conceptual significance.

At one time, the photo editor made an art form of sleight of hand, of juggling pieces of photographs; the constructed imagery resulted in novel compositions. Presented as news, these creations were merely fragments of the "real" world. Even as the photo-editor insisted on the reality of each photograph's individual elements, he denied them any sense of uniqueness or wholeness by subordinating individual elements to the picture's overall composition. This exhibition does not ask why photo-editors or retouchers chose to edit what they did, and what the consequences - visually, socially, historically - of this action might have been. Instead, this exhibition examines the edited newspaper photograph as art objects in and of themselves. The infinitely reproducible photograph, with the help of the editor's hand, reclaims the aura of the original. Contrasting areas of slick photograph and thick paint create corresponding states of tension and equilibrium. With the passage of time, that which was altered or omitted became elusive, then contingent upon elements which remain visible, the current cultural context, and the psyche of the viewer. The hand-edited photograph, with its marks of revision, is an elegant alternative to the photograph as "window onto the world."

A New Context is sponsored in part by The Baltimore Sun.

This exhibition was curated from pieces collected from the Baltimore Sun Archives housed in UMBC's Special Collections in the Albin O. Kuhn Library. Approximately 750,000 prints, negatives and transparencies dating from the 1930s through the 1980s are contained in the Sun photography collection. It is estimated that 90% are original Baltimore Sun photographs while the remaining are from non-Sun sources.