[Derby Crowds]

Nicholls, a freelance press photographer who specialized in images of Edwardian high society, was typical of the first generation of professional photojournalists in his supple approach to photographic truth. If his camera failed to adequately capture his experience of an event, he had no qualms about combining elements from different negatives to create a more compelling image—a fact he rarely acknowledged in his captions. To enhance the impression of swarming crowds at Epsom Downs one rainy Derby Day, he cloned several groups of umbrella-toting spectators and pasted them into unoccupied areas in his original image.