Painted press photographs reveal both the technical limits and the creative possibilities of 20th-century photomechanical reproduction. Before newspapers could render subtle tonal shifts, artists and editors often intervened directly on prints—painting in highlights and shadows to clarify form, suppressing unwanted detail, or adding decorative effects.

From today’s digital perspective, these objects are more than functional tools of mass communication. They are compelling artifacts—layered, handmade surfaces that invite close looking, much like photogravures or other hybrid print processes.

This early press photograph, taken in Poland during the Russian Civil War (circa 1919–1920), depicts a mounted soldier of Asian origin serving with the Bolshevik forces. Western observers sometimes labeled such troops as “Chinese Tartars,” though they were typically factory laborers or expatriates from regions like Siberia and Chinese Turkestan who had joined the Red Army in various auxiliary and combat roles. Archival evidence indicates that tens of thousands of Chinese nationals served across military and security units, including in the Cheka and in mounted formations such as the 1st Cavalry Army (which included about 500 Chinese cavalrymen). This continues a longer historical lineage in Eastern Europe, where nomadic steppe cavalry — including Tatar horsemen — had previously been employed as mercenaries in regional conflicts.

At the same time, they speak to the constructed nature of news imagery. Publishers and photographers did not hesitate to retouch, recombine, or even invent visual information, raising enduring questions about the photograph as “truth.” Ironically, photogravure and other early photomechanical techniques had first been hailed as the process that could reproduce for wider dissemination photographs “untouched” by the engraver’s hand—trusted as faithful and truthful. Yet a century later, photographs destined for newspapers, the supposed guardians of fact, were routinely manipulated as industry standard. Photomechanical reproduction had come full circle—only backwards.

In this way, painted press photographs are not only fascinating and often beautiful objects, they also foreshadow contemporary debates about manipulation, authenticity, and “fake news.”