Darkroom stories

 In 1958 Lange accompanied her husband Paul Taylor on a seven-month business trip. Taylor's work consulting for the Agency for International Development took them to countries throughout Asia, including South Korea.
 While they were there, Lange photographed with a new 35-mm camera. Unlike the heavy, large-format cameras she had used before, the smaller 35-mm was ideal for travel photography. [...]
 While visiting a local school, she photographed a group of excited students in a crowded classroom. Despite the children's joyful commotion, their tattered clothes hint at the economic downturn that followed the Korean War.
 This contact sheet shows Lange's photographs from that classroom. A contact sheet is the positive print of negative images from a roll of film. These sheets offer insight into how a photographer works – and how they choose images to enlarge and develop in the darkroom. [...]
 The fourth image from the left is the one that Lange ultimately chose to print. In this picture, one of the boys in the front row faces forward. Some photographers might have dismissed this image as flawed – the boy is blinking after all. But Lange may have seen in his face a moment of peace in the otherwise lively scene. [...]
 Lange insulated this boy from the bustle of the classroom by dramatically cropping her photograph. [...]
 It seems that the area around the boy's face was darkened. This was likely done not by Lange herself, but by the San Francisco-based printer she worked with while preparing for her 1966 MoMA retrospective, Irwin Welcher. Welcher may have used a darkroom technique called burning to darken a specific area of the print by exposing it to extra light.