Apparatus for simultaneous viewing of front and rear surfaces of webs of exposed and developed photographic paper has a frame which supports a rearwardly and upwardly inclined transparent pane constituting the front panel of a box. The frame has a rear wall which is normal to the pane and carries two spindles extending in parallelism with the plane of the pane and serving to support supply and takeup reels for a web of photographic paper whereby the rear side of the web portion between the reels lies against the front side of the pane and the front side of such web portion is observable from the front side of the frame. The box and/or the frame contains a drive which can rotate the one or the other spindle in a direction to cause the respective reel to collect the web while braking the other spindle, and the box contains a pair of mirrors which reflect the image of the rear side of the web portion through the pane so that such image can be seen by a person sitting or standing in front of the frame and viewing the front side of the web portion. At least the spindle for the supply reel is close to the floor so that the supply reel, which normally carries a large roll of convoluted photographic paper, need not be lifted well above the floor in order to be placed onto the respective spindle.