The dressing room is the only part of the industry that was honest about what it was doing. Everyone in that room knew the face was being built. There was no pretence that beauty arrived naturally — there was a call time, a mirror, a chair, and a schedule to meet.

The expertise in those rooms has gone almost entirely unrecorded. Hair was architecture: finger waves set, dried and dressed out so they would hold under a key light and read as waves rather than as a flat grey mass on film. The face was engineering of another kind — Max Factor pancake laid down to give period stock a surface it could actually register. The people who did that work were specialists, and almost none of them are named in any history of the period.

This is also where the photographs in this exhibition were made. The Inchcolm Sessions were shot in a 1930 building in Brisbane with the studio lighting rebuilt from first principles — Fresnels and scrims set to the recipes of Hurrell and Clarence Sinclair Bull, with period costume and period technique — to find out how that light actually behaves on a real body in a real room. The paintings are built from what that taught, not from copying old photographs.

Nothing in these rooms is accidental, which is why they are the most sympathetic part of the exhibition. A woman at a mirror is not being vain. She is at work, doing something difficult, for an audience that will never see the effort and would think less of her if it did.