Retouching negatives at Aberdeen People's Press

Before the arrival of desktop publishing alternative newspapers, magazines and publications of all kinds were produced by the process of offset lithography. Many of the smaller papers used typewriters to ‘compose’ text which was then pasted up with illustrations and photographed. The resulting silver-based film was then used to print the image of the resulting montage on a thin aluminium plate which was attached to the impression cylinder of a small offset printing press. Here we see someone retouching the negative of a two-page spread to eliminate imperfections left by dust during the photographic process. If you look closely at the article on the right-hand page you'll see that fighting the consequences of the ‘energy crisis’ and fuel poverty were already on activists' agendas in the 1970s.