Image manipulation has always been rife in photography. The airbrush tool is more than a whimsical reference to the past, an actual airbrush was commonly used on prints long before digital photography was even a glint in our eye.
British photographer Tony Richards first got interested in Victorian touch-up technology when he started to look more closely at fine albumen prints. When he scanned the photographic plates from which albumen prints were made, he noticed the photographers’ touch-up marks on the emulsion side of the plates — a result he notes was “quite possibly the opposite effect than that [which] was originally intended for the printed version.”
Here are some examples of the photos followed by high-res scans of the original plates:
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