On the making of our plates, why every image is shot in-house, what we refuse to retouch, and what a photograph owes the door it precedes.
In the language of old publishing, the plates were the pages a book was judged by, the full-page images readers turned to first and trusted most. This house uses the word deliberately. The photographs on our pages are plates: commissioned, produced and printed by us, to standards this issue sets out, because in this trade the image is the contract and we sign ours carefully.
The first standard is provenance. Every plate is taken by the house, in rooms we control, of the woman whose page it prints. Nothing is licensed, borrowed, or supplied by an applicant from her own archive, the polite fiction on which half this industry's imagery runs. When Vanessa's page shows a woman in lamplight, the woman is Vanessa, the lamplight is ours, and the door you open later will confirm both.
Post-production in this house is a short list of permissions and a long list of refusals. We will correct colour, since hotel lamps lie about warmth. We will not revise a body. Waists, skin texture, the small asymmetries that make a face a face, these pass through untouched, because every centimetre the retoucher moves is a centimetre of disappointment scheduled for later. A plate that outperforms its subject is not flattering her; it is writing a cheque she will be asked to cash at your door. The house does not print bad cheques.
The second standard is register. Our plates are lit like the house sounds, dark grounds, warm lamplight, more shadow than the trade's daylight-and-white-linen convention permits. This is partly signature and partly information: the rooms these women will actually enter are evening rooms, and a photograph should rehearse its own future. A plate shot at noon promises an hour that does not exist.
Plates age, and the house retires them on a schedule rather than a scandal. When a woman changes her hair, the plate follows within the season. When an image and its subject drift apart in any way a stranger could notice, the image loses. The masthead is re-shot as a matter of routine housekeeping, which is unglamorous and is also the entire point: accuracy is not a launch feature, it is maintenance.
Readers sometimes ask why we spend this much care on pictures when the work itself is the product. The answer is that the plate is the first touch. Long before oil is warmed or a lobby is crossed, a photograph has already told you whether this house means what it prints. We would like that first touch to be as honest as the fourteen that follow it.