In the decades after Second World War photographers grew confident as autonomous artists, but they lacked access to museum space yet. Photography was still meant to be published and printed through the illustrated press. However, the editorial process of regular publishing left photographers little artistic space. Therefore,they created a new platform to present their photographs and to unfold their photographic narratives freely: the photobook. Photographers made workbooks and dummies by hand with great care, sometimes in close collaboration with a like-minded graphic designer. Sometimes, they are just one-leaf storyboards, other times they are piles of sheets with photographs glued on them or even manually assembled entire books with vintage print photographs glued on its white pages. For photographers, dummies served as try-outs for combinations, layouts and narrative rhythms of the book pages. Also, photographers used these dummies in the process of fundraising to realize their books: to convince whoever had to be involved in the production of the final result. The dummies required hours and days of darkroom photoprint production, much manual cutting and collaging and redoing for better results. This practice disappeared around the 1990s, when photobooks were increasingly designed on the computer. The dummies are valued today because of their vintage and unique character, and because the handwork, annotations and different preliminary stages render insight into the photographers' artistic process and ideas.