Could you rebuild a missing face from another photograph of them?

No photograph but the one you send is ever looked at, and that is less reassuring than it sounds. What arrives in a missing face is drawn from nothing whatever — not another likeness, not the family, not anything that stood in front of a camera.

How much of it genuinely comes back?

Recovered and filled are two questions. A missing corner of sky is filled with sky and may fairly be called recovered; a missing shoulder generally too. A face, a hand or a word is filled with an answer nobody has, and filled just as tidily.

Why not leave the gap empty instead?

That is precisely what we asked for, in the instructions accompanying every photograph, and it did not hold. A hole gets closed the way a scratch does. What is left is to tell you which parts of your own print to mistrust, which is the whole purpose of this page.

How am I to tell the invented part from the rest?

Set the mend beside your own scan at full size and mark where the damage ran. Whatever now stands inside those edges came from us. Do it once on a photograph you know by heart, and you will know what to look for on the ones you do not.

A photograph with pieces missing

Here the limits are the point. Where a piece has gone, nothing underneath it survived, and what appears in that space afterwards is not a recovery of it. It is whatever fits.

Over a wall, a floor, sky or plain ground, whatever fits is close enough to what stood there. Over a face, a hand, a sign or a crowd it is fiction — arriving at precisely the same quality as the rest of the print, which is what makes it worth a page of its own.

We cannot hold the mend off the second case. We asked it to, in the words that go out with every photograph, and it fills the gap regardless. So this page shows that happening rather than promising it will not.

Mend one photograph, free What a pack costs

What fills a gap in a damaged photograph is our best guess, not what was there.

A monochrome view of a house above a lake, a large irregular area of the picture lost to black — A large piece gone from the upper left, taking sky, part of the house front and a run of shoreline. All three are back, and not one of them records anything.

The same view returned whole, the loss filled with roofline, trees and shore that were never photographed — A large piece gone from the upper left, taking sky, part of the house front and a run of shoreline. All three are back, and not one of them records anything.

What comes back

Missing corners and chewed edges, rebuilt by continuing the wall, floor, sky, foliage or plain ground around them.
Fabric, wallpaper and other patterns, wherever the pattern settles the question.
The ragged border where a piece tore out, tidied so the eye is not caught by it.
Everything else in the photograph, which is usually most of it and usually why it is worth mending at all.

What never comes back

A face that has gone completely. One arrives in its place, belonging to nobody who ever lived, and nothing on the file marks out which face that was.
A hand, a cap badge, a shop sign or a name. Where the answer is particular rather than general, a particular answer is supplied, and supplied with confidence.
Someone cut out of the photograph deliberately. The cut is filled — with the room behind them, or with somebody else entirely — and none of it returns the person who stood there.
Anyone standing in the part of a group that has gone. A crowd is carried into a gap as readily as a wall is, a convincing face at a time.

What fills a gap in a damaged photograph is our best guess, not what was there.

Three of these, mended

A glass plate photograph of a building frontage, a curved area missing from the upper right — A curved bite out of the top right, across sky and roofline together. The sky is the easy half; the run of cornice that came back with it is a guess.

The same frontage, sky filled in and the roofline carried on beyond where the plate stopped — A curved bite out of the top right, across sky and roofline together. The sky is the easy half; the run of cornice that came back with it is a guess.

A battalion photograph with its entire left half destroyed by black rot and flaking — The left half of this battalion had rotted away. It came back man for man, in step and in uniform. Not one of those faces belongs to a soldier who was there, and this is the example to study hardest before paying for anything.

The same photograph returned complete, the destroyed half filled with rows of soldiers the mend supplied — The left half of this battalion had rotted away. It came back man for man, in step and in uniform. Not one of those faces belongs to a soldier who was there, and this is the example to study hardest before paying for anything.

If you still have the fragments

Scan them. A fragment that will not sit flat still holds picture information, and a fragment in the scan turns a reconstruction into a mend. Keep them in a paper envelope rather than a polythene bag, and glue nothing down. The guide below is about the point at which a conservator is worth the fee.

What a conservator does that no software can

Questions about this sort of damage

Could you rebuild a missing face from another photograph of them?: No photograph but the one you send is ever looked at, and that is less reassuring than it sounds. What arrives in a missing face is drawn from nothing whatever — not another likeness, not the family, not anything that stood in front of a camera.
How much of it genuinely comes back?: Recovered and filled are two questions. A missing corner of sky is filled with sky and may fairly be called recovered; a missing shoulder generally too. A face, a hand or a word is filled with an answer nobody has, and filled just as tidily.
Why not leave the gap empty instead?: That is precisely what we asked for, in the instructions accompanying every photograph, and it did not hold. A hole gets closed the way a scratch does. What is left is to tell you which parts of your own print to mistrust, which is the whole purpose of this page.
How am I to tell the invented part from the rest?: Set the mend beside your own scan at full size and mark where the damage ran. Whatever now stands inside those edges came from us. Do it once on a photograph you know by heart, and you will know what to look for on the ones you do not.

Try it on yours

One photograph, mended, free, with no card. Send this exact sort of damage and see the result before spending anything.

Mend one photograph, free

If it doesn't look like the person you remember, you don't pay.

Other sorts of damage