Sending an image quickly from one place to another was first achieved early in the twentieth century with the Belinograph, an apparatus developed by the French inventor Édouard Belin.

David Pace and Stephen Wirtz manipulate and transform wirephotos transmitted during the Second World War. Beginning with an extensive collection of originals assembled by Wirtz over many years, they scan them, radically re-cropping and dramatically enlarging portions. Their croppings expose the artefacts of the technology — the dots, lines, irregularities and retouchings of the war years — but they also reverse the intentions of the wartime retouchers: instead of obscuring the dots and lines to make a clearer picture, they reveal and enhance them, exposing the processes that produced the images; instead of retouching to create an illusion of reality, they make visible the manipulation of what was published as news.