Every photographer who's ever handed film to a lab tech must have wondered what the person on the other side of the darkroom door makes of it. Roland Haupt not only formed a view, he kept the best prints for himself.
Haupt worked as a darkroom printer in the London office of Vogue magazine from the early 1940s, processing work for two of the era's most celebrated photographers, Lee Miller and Sir Cecil Beaton. In doing so, he occupied one of the most privileged positions in the history of photography: the first person outside the field to see the images as they emerged from the developer, fresh from the frontlines of the Second World War.
