One Photo: A Chinese Beauty as Spectator at the Horse Races at Longchamps, near Paris.’ n.d.

It was the error in the caption that first caught my eye, as the woman wears formal Japanese dress. When I received the press photograph I had bought online, it had two paper captions pasted on the back, both crediting ‘Copyright Keystone View Co.’; the first typed in English, the second in German with the addition ‘Text ohne Gewahr, A.’ (Text without Awareness, A.)

The Keystone View Company, trading in Pennsylvania from 1892, specialized in stereographic photographs; but it also operated as Keystone Press supplying press photographs after the Great War, with offices in London and by 1927, Paris and Berlin. Keystone Press was the result of a merger with Press Illustrating Service, a New York photo agency started in 1914 by Bert Garai, a Hungarian refugee who innovated a new photojournalist style of informal celebrity photos and news stories.