---
title: "‘I Took Out A Hair. I Taped It To The Card.’ Ronan Prynne-Machado, 84."
dek: "A 1988 book named him as the man who took objects out of three famous photographs. He kept his laboratory's retouch log at home, and it records what came off each print: a hair, a fibre, a registration cross."
kind: obit (Obituary)
desk: Obituaries
author: Gilbert Ames (fictional)
published: 2026-08-21T05:00:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/obit-ronan-prynne-machado
tags: photographic retouching, federal laboratories, Suitland, provenance, 1988
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

# ‘I Took Out A Hair. I Taped It To The Card.’ Ronan Prynne-Machado, 84.

*A 1988 book named him as the man who took objects out of three famous photographs. He kept his laboratory's retouch log at home, and it records what came off each print: a hair, a fibre, a registration cross.*

The hair is still on the card.

It is taped across the corner of job card 71-0412 with a strip of linen tape gone the colour of weak tea, under four words in pencil: *out of gate, mine.*

Ronan Prynne-Machado put it there in the spring of 1971 and never took it off. He died of a stroke on 11 July, at 84, at his home in Suitland, Maryland.

## The trade

He retouched prints at a federal photographic laboratory from 1964 to 1995. The work was neither secret nor clever. A briefing print had to be legible across a conference room at three metres, often at an angle, often to a man who would not put his glasses on.

So the retoucher dodged and burned to hold the tones, laid dye with a 000 sable to knock back a hot highlight, drew a 6H graphite line where an edge had gone soft, and used opaque white — the last resort, and the one that shows — on dust, fibres and scratches in the emulsion.

Eleven people did that job in that building. Every one of them signed the card.

## The book

In 1988 a book called *The Retouched Century* named him. Not as one of a class of technicians: by name, on page 211, in three sentences, as the man who removed objects from three famous photographs.

He wrote to its author three times. He wrote to eleven publishers over thirty years — thirty-one letters, nineteen replies — and kept the whole correspondence in a manila folder his granddaughter found in a footlocker, marked ANSWERED in the same pencil as the job card.

The letters barely vary. Each sets out the three job numbers in order, and twenty-eight of the thirty-one end on the same two lines: *I took out a hair. I taped it to the card.* Then his name, and the job number again underneath it.

This newspaper has taken its headline from those two lines, which is a thing he did not agree to and cannot now be asked about.

## The log

He also took home something he had no right to take: a carbon duplicate of the laboratory's retouch log.

14,203 entries. Date, job number, what came off, what it was done with, initials. He began copying it in 1966 and stopped in 1995, and he told his granddaughter once, in a sentence she wrote down at the time, that he did it because one day somebody was going to say he had.

We asked the government for its own copy, expecting nothing. The release covers 1979 to 1995; everything earlier went on a records schedule in 1997. Of 340 entries we could set side by side, 338 match to the word. One has a transposed date. One appears in his carbon and not in the official copy at all, and both pages are published with this story.

The nearest thing in our own vault is [[PX-1963]]: twelve tests applied to a set of papers by people who had the papers in front of them. Nobody did the equivalent here in thirty-eight years.

## The three photographs

Job 69-1140: *fibre, copy glass, opaque wh., 2 strokes.*

Job 71-0412: *hair, gate, dye 4B + graphite.* That is the hair on the card.

Job 63-2288: *reg. cross, camera, opaqued at request of briefing officer.*

The third is the one worth explaining. Every frame from that camera carried a fiducial cross exposed onto it by a plate behind the lens — a surveying mark, printed by the machine, on every negative it ever made. On 63-2288 the cross falls across the object everyone argues about. The briefing officer asked for it out so the shape could be read at three metres.

What the 1988 book describes as an object removed from a photograph is the ghost of the laboratory's own registration mark, taken off at a named man's request, on a Tuesday, and written down.

> **Figure:** A section through print 71-0412, where the 1988 book says an object came out — see https://theyburied.com/article/obit-ronan-prynne-machado

## The hair

We sent the card to a forensic microscopist who was not told what the story was.

Dr. Halvard Onyekwere-Sant reports a human head hair, 84 micrometres at the shaft, medium brown, consistent in scale pattern and pigment distribution with samples his family took from a brush in his bathroom. He declines the word identification, and so do we.

> A hair in the gate is the commonest fault in the trade and the dullest fact in your newspaper. It is also the only physical evidence anybody has produced in thirty-eight years.
>
> — Dr. Halvard Onyekwere-Sant

## What was corrected

Two publishers corrected in later editions, in 1996 and in 2004. Neither correction uses his name, which is the name the original sentence used.

## What this desk takes from it

Retouching was a documented trade. It had a vocabulary, a fee schedule, a signature line and a log, and for the whole length of the argument the log sat in a building with a switchboard and a number in the directory.

Merrit Vaughan-Sloane, who wrote the book and answers us at the foot of the page, makes the objection we cannot close: the log records what came off prints that were made, and it cannot record a negative nobody printed. That is true. It is the part of this story that stays open, and he is right that the third job card is a record of somebody deciding what a room would be able to see.

He did not label the folder VINDICATED. He labelled it ANSWERED, which is a smaller claim, and it is the one he was entitled to.

It is in Hyattsville now, with his granddaughter, along with the card, the tape, and the hair.

## Sources (invented)

- The Prynne-Machado carbon log, 1966–1995, Carbon duplicate of a federal laboratory's retouch log, 14,203 entries — Given to us by his granddaughter after his death; photographed page by page and published entire with this story (July 2026)
- Ines Prynne-Machado Duarte, Granddaughter; a school registrar in Hyattsville, Maryland — Interviewed at her kitchen table twice, and given the full draft and the reply to read before publication (July and August 2026)
- Dr. Halvard Onyekwere-Sant, Forensic microscopist — Commissioned to examine the taped hair and the print surfaces without being told what the story was about (August 2026)
- The laboratory's own retained retouch log, Official copy, 1979–1995, released in part — Requested under freedom of information; released after eleven months with initials and one job series withheld (June 2026)
- Merrit Vaughan-Sloane, Author of The Retouched Century, 1988 — Sent the full draft, the three log entries and the microscopist's report, with four weeks to answer (August 2026)

## Documents cited (invented)

- PX-1963: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1963

## What we could not confirm

- Whether the carbon is complete. It is a copy he made himself, of a document he was not allowed to copy, and an entry he chose not to transfer would leave no trace we could find. The official release covers only 1979 onward, so for the three jobs at issue — 1963, 1969 and 1971 — the carbon is checkable against the job cards and against nothing else.
- The hair. Dr. Onyekwere-Sant reports a human head hair consistent in scale pattern, diameter and pigment with samples the family took from his brush. Consistent is not the same as his. No DNA was attempted, because his granddaughter declined, and we think a family is entitled to decline.
- What the laboratory did not print. The log records interventions on prints that were made. It cannot record a negative nobody enlarged or a frame nobody issued, and that gap is the whole of Merrit Vaughan-Sloane's objection to this story. We cannot close it and we have not tried to.

## Right of reply

**Merrit Vaughan-Sloane, author of The Retouched Century (1988)** (Replied 18 August 2026, asking that it run entire, including the parts where nothing is conceded. Printed unedited.):

> I am seventy-nine and I have been waiting thirty-eight years for this letter, and it has arrived from a newspaper instead of from him, which is the part I mind.
> 
> Let me concede what I should concede. Page 211 of my book names a man and says that he removed objects from three photographs. I had no document for that sentence. I had two conversations, one of them at a conference bar, and a strong sense of how such a laboratory must work. A strong sense is not a source.
> 
> The 1996 edition corrected the third of the three, because a reader sent me the fiducial-plate specification and I could see he was right. I did not correct the other two, and I am not going to pretend, now that the man is dead and you have a hair in a bag, that I have changed my mind about them. I will say why instead, and your readers can weigh it.
> 
> His log is a record of interventions on prints that were made. That is not nothing. It is also not what I was writing about. A photographic laboratory's power is not chiefly in the dye and the opaque white. It is in which negative is printed, at what size, at what contrast, and for whom — and none of that is in his log, because none of it was his to decide or his to record. You have established that the man at the bottom of the process kept beautiful books. I never said he didn't.
> 
> Now read your own sentence about the third photograph. The surveying cross fell across the object, so a briefing officer asked for the cross to be taken out, so that the object could be read across a room. Read it again. Somebody decided what a room full of people would be able to see, and somebody else wrote it on a card, and you have printed the card as an exoneration. It is a record of an editorial act. That it was logged is a credit to the clerk. It is not a fact about the picture.
> 
> On the hair: you commissioned a microscopist, he was careful, and he declined to say the word you wanted. You then put the hair in your headline in the man's own voice. I am not sure what a hair consistent with his own establishes about a photograph, beyond that a hair was in a gate on some day, which nobody has ever disputed.
> 
> And now the part that is not argument. I put a private man's name in a book because a name is more readable than a laboratory, which is the same instinct that made him good at his job and made him useful to my index. He wrote to me three times. I answered once, in 1991, badly, and I have the carbon of it. I should have written to him in 1996, when I made the correction. I did not, because writing to him would have meant saying I had been careless about him in particular rather than wrong in general, and those are different letters.
> 
> Print all of that, including the paragraphs where I give you nothing.

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