Speaker 1: Technology with tex Stuff from Hooks dot Com. Say there
Speaker 1: and welcome to text Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland, and with
Speaker 1: me today is a very special guest, our own photographical
Speaker 1: expert here at hell Stuff, where it's Dylan. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the show. Thanks thanks for having me. Yeah, Dylan and
Speaker 1: I have had some really cool discussions about the technology
Speaker 1: of photography and some different ideas around it, and Dylan
Speaker 1: has generously offered up some of his precious time to
Speaker 1: jump into the studio to talk about photo manipulation and
Speaker 1: photo editing. So this is going to be a two
Speaker 1: part podcast. We know that starting off, we're gonna concentrate
Speaker 1: on sort of the pre digital era for this first episode,
Speaker 1: and then our next one will be kind of the
Speaker 1: various techniques and motivations behind photo manipulation and the post
Speaker 1: digital era where we're no longer talking necessarily about physical
Speaker 1: media but lots of zeros and ones instead. But the
Speaker 1: the interesting thing to me is that photo manipulation has
Speaker 1: been around almost as long as photography has, and in
Speaker 1: large part because of the limitations of photography, especially the
Speaker 1: early days, it was kind of seen early on as okay,
Speaker 1: well we have the foundation down now, how do we
Speaker 1: make up for all the things that we can't do
Speaker 1: at least yet. You know, you don't know in their
Speaker 1: mind if they knew that was going to be a
Speaker 1: possibility in the future, but um, it kind of gave
Speaker 1: them the ability to add to a photo what cameras
Speaker 1: were not able to do at the moment. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: those early cameras were incredibly limited. And uh, you know
Speaker 1: it helps if we take kind of a step back
Speaker 1: and look at a little bit of history. And by
Speaker 1: a little bit of history, I mean I've created a
Speaker 1: timeline to kind of walk us through the early development
Speaker 1: no pun intended. Okay, no, that was definitely a pun
Speaker 1: intended of photography. So before we get to any photography
Speaker 1: at all, before we get to the point where we're
Speaker 1: recording light onto some medium, we can talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about the camera obscura, which was not necessarily about
Speaker 1: recording recording images, but more about projecting them. Yes, and
Speaker 1: this is ancient technology. I mean, when you think about it,
Speaker 1: the basic technology was a dark chamber or room through
Speaker 1: which you have a hole in one wall and then
Speaker 1: you can project across the on the opposite wall. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, what you saw on the opposite wall would
Speaker 1: be correct in perspective, but it would be eight degrees
Speaker 1: rotating a hundred degrees. It would be upside down. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I I have often seen this used as a
Speaker 1: way for artists who wanted to do a big wall mural.
Speaker 1: For example, they would have an image on one side,
Speaker 1: so it would be projected large on the opposite where
Speaker 1: they could actually trace things out, although not all artists
Speaker 1: were very capable of doing this, and it wouldn't be
Speaker 1: until the Renaissance. Like even though the technology itself was
Speaker 1: thousands of years old in the sense that the ancient
Speaker 1: Chinese and Greeks were using the sort of yeah, it
Speaker 1: really does. It's always like it's always like, well you
Speaker 1: have you gotta look to the Middle East and you
Speaker 1: gotta look to China for some of these amazing developments
Speaker 1: that took a long time to make their way to
Speaker 1: the Western world. But in the Renaissance, there was an
Speaker 1: Italian writer named Gia Batista de la Porta who was
Speaker 1: really the first to use a lens arrangement in camera scares.
Speaker 1: It was more than just the simple hole or a mirror.
Speaker 1: It was a lens. And uh, that's where we started
Speaker 1: really calling it camera obscura. And then you move ahead
Speaker 1: about a hundred years to and that's when a gentleman
Speaker 1: by the name of Johann Heinrich Schulz uh noticed something
Speaker 1: really odd. In fact, it was something that other people
Speaker 1: had noticed, but he was the one who actually put
Speaker 1: two and two together. We're talking silver salts here. Now,
Speaker 1: silver salts, when exposed to light, uh get darker. And
Speaker 1: this is a major part of early photography. But for
Speaker 1: a long time people thought that it was heat that
Speaker 1: made the salts turn dark. Now, what Schultz did was
Speaker 1: he had an experiment where he he had essentially a
Speaker 1: surface covered in silver salts, and he put a covering
Speaker 1: over it so that he could spell out a word
Speaker 1: in the silver salt, and then exposed that to light
Speaker 1: and it made those salts turn dark. So he actually
Speaker 1: could spell out words using light this way, but he
Speaker 1: didn't have any way of preserving it. There's no way
Speaker 1: for him to keep this so that it would permanently
Speaker 1: have this word. In fact, as soon as you remove
Speaker 1: the covering and the rest of the salts are exposed
Speaker 1: to light, everything turns dark. So it's like you have
Speaker 1: a temporary image. It's kind of like the snapchat of
Speaker 1: its day. Yeah, that a very very kind of simple
Speaker 1: snapchat where someone would have to be in there with
Speaker 1: you and be like, all right, you're gonna have to
Speaker 1: look at this right now, because as soon as I
Speaker 1: turn on the light, this sucker, it's it's it's time
Speaker 1: will be very limited a latent image. Um yeah, in
Speaker 1: a way that like if you see something very bright
Speaker 1: and you close your eyes right there, it is first second. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it wouldn't be until the eighteen twenties. That's when
Speaker 1: a fellow by the name of Anissa four neepsie, thank
Speaker 1: you for pronouncing that. That's a guess my French jump.
Speaker 1: Papa francis bien mais, So I am not very good
Speaker 1: with the French pronunciation. I haven't had a French since
Speaker 1: high school, so I apologize for butchering the name. But
Speaker 1: he developed a technique to use light in order to
Speaker 1: make copies of engravings. And what he would do is
Speaker 1: he would take it engraving and cover it an oil,
Speaker 1: and then he would put the engraving on a plate
Speaker 1: that was coated with a combination of lavender oil and
Speaker 1: vitamin of Judea, which is a light sensitive material. And
Speaker 1: uh yeah, and he had the first successful image in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixteen. Yeah, amazing, right, Like he was able to
Speaker 1: use this and he called the process heliography, meaning from
Speaker 1: the sun to right, So it was close to photography,
Speaker 1: but he was calling it heliography. By eighteen twenty six,
Speaker 1: he was using that process on lots of stuff like
Speaker 1: lithographic stone, on glass, on zinc, and on pewter plates.
Speaker 1: And in eighteen six he used a camera obscura and
Speaker 1: pewter plate to produce a photograph from nature. It was
Speaker 1: an image of the courtyard of his estate. It was
Speaker 1: taken from an upstairs balcony and over the course of
Speaker 1: eight hours. Yes, it took a number of hours. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That was the real issue where with these early approaches
Speaker 1: is that they had not perfected the chemistry necessary to
Speaker 1: have this reaction of light that would affect chemicals in
Speaker 1: such a way as to preserve an image. What's really
Speaker 1: funny is that the lens technology was much farther ahead
Speaker 1: from the start than the chemistry, and a lot of
Speaker 1: early photography was really only limited by the chemicals involved. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you would end up having these super long exposure
Speaker 1: times in the In some cases it meant that the
Speaker 1: the image you produced is otherworldly because in the case
Speaker 1: of this one with a courtyard, the lights coming from
Speaker 1: the sun and it's over the course of eight hours,
Speaker 1: which reads, the sun starts in the east and ends
Speaker 1: in the west. So in the finished image you have
Speaker 1: light from the sun shining from both directions. It's as
Speaker 1: if you know, obviously we don't live in a world
Speaker 1: where you can really do that in a in an
Speaker 1: in stint, you would have to have this long exposure
Speaker 1: time in order to achieve that so kind of a
Speaker 1: special effect just by the very limitation of the media itself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the exposure time is early on would would make things,
Speaker 1: like you said, look very otherworldly. And it was just
Speaker 1: because it was out of necessity, that's what they had. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they didn't have any option really, Like it wasn't like
Speaker 1: it had nothing to do with shutter speed or any
Speaker 1: of the other stuff we talked about with cameras. It
Speaker 1: had specifically to do with the limitation of the materials,
Speaker 1: the chemicals they were using. By eighteen thirty three, that's
Speaker 1: when we first start seeing the term photograph being used. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in fact, it was apparently coined by a fellow
Speaker 1: named Hercules Florence or Hercule floren if you want to
Speaker 1: be fancy. Uh. He coined the term, using it to
Speaker 1: describe a process in which he used paper with silver
Speaker 1: salts to produce prints of drawings. However, his work actually
Speaker 1: largely took place in Brazil, and because Brazil was so
Speaker 1: far removed from all the other areas that we're looking into,
Speaker 1: this mostly in Europe, his work remained largely unknown until
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies. And I would like to notice is
Speaker 1: really interesting work. It's something to look into. He had
Speaker 1: some nice photographs, yeah. Yeah. And and our next fellow
Speaker 1: who made a big impression on photography is one that
Speaker 1: probably most people have heard, at least heard the technology
Speaker 1: named after him. That would be uh, Louis jacquesmand the
Speaker 1: Gare type. Yeah. So he used the camera obscura in
Speaker 1: a plate of iodized silver, which would allow him to
Speaker 1: create a latent image of a scene. That's what Dylan
Speaker 1: was talking about just a minute ago. And he found
Speaker 1: that if you expose that plate to mercury vapor, the
Speaker 1: exposed parts of the image, the ones that had been
Speaker 1: exposed to light, would become visible, so it would develop.
Speaker 1: This is where we start talking about developing photographs, and
Speaker 1: that approach reduced the exposure times needed eventually from eight
Speaker 1: hours down to around half an hour ish um using
Speaker 1: this particular approach, But there was a drawback. If the
Speaker 1: developed picture was exposed to light, like after you've taken it,
Speaker 1: then the unexposed areas of silver would continue to darken
Speaker 1: and eventually the image would become impossible to see. So
Speaker 1: you'd have an image for a while. But again, imagine
Speaker 1: that you have a photograph in your hand and you
Speaker 1: take it out anywhere where there's light, and it would
Speaker 1: just gradually become a dark picture, like there will be
Speaker 1: no no, no way of distinguishing what was there before. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like like it before you expose film and a film
Speaker 1: camera if anyone's ever done that, you have to go
Speaker 1: into a pitch black room to do so because once
Speaker 1: you open the back of the light tight camera, when
Speaker 1: if you have that film exposed to the you know,
Speaker 1: to light, it's it's just gonna go completely dark. You're
Speaker 1: not going to be able to take any photographs with
Speaker 1: that role of film right now, Dylan, have you ever
Speaker 1: worked in the dark room? I have, yes, So what
Speaker 1: is what is it like when you are doing something
Speaker 1: like that, like you know the the we've seen movies
Speaker 1: with the process where you've got the people with like
Speaker 1: the three or four different little basins filled with fluid
Speaker 1: and there's never any explanation of what was actually happening.
Speaker 1: It is. It's an updated version of something like the
Speaker 1: gear was doing. The chemicals are a lot less dangerous
Speaker 1: using mercury. You're a lot less likely to go crazy
Speaker 1: or catch on fire. Yes, yes, but it's a it's
Speaker 1: a process, but it's something that I think if you're
Speaker 1: interested in photography you should you should try the development process,
Speaker 1: um because from going into the closet to load your film,
Speaker 1: figuring out how to open something and put it in
Speaker 1: the back of the camera in Pitch Black, is is
Speaker 1: a lot of it's frustrating, but it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: And then you you know, even to the I don't
Speaker 1: want to get too ahead of us, but the photo
Speaker 1: the process of taking a photographs a lot different because
Speaker 1: you realize you have like twelve to thirties six shots
Speaker 1: and so it's it's not like on your phone or
Speaker 1: on your digital camera, which is which is great freedom.
Speaker 1: But you think I paid I paid money for this
Speaker 1: film and it makes you much more selective and careful,
Speaker 1: and and only that, but I mean even that is
Speaker 1: a huge step from what we're talking about here, where
Speaker 1: taking a single image required so much effort just the
Speaker 1: not just the taking it, but the developing of that
Speaker 1: single image took so much effort that obviously the composition
Speaker 1: of your shot was really important. And if you messed
Speaker 1: that up, you're talking about a day's work. In some cases,
Speaker 1: that's a lot of for one image. It's it's easy
Speaker 1: for us to forget that in the realm of selfies
Speaker 1: that we have today. Yeah, so I'll definitely be relying
Speaker 1: upon you heavily when we start talking about manipulation in
Speaker 1: this world. But to get back to the history, just
Speaker 1: a couple more points I want to make. Uh, So
Speaker 1: we've got to get who starts solving the problem of
Speaker 1: this image immediately disappearing if you were to expose it
Speaker 1: to light by using ordinary table salt. Actually, yeah, he
Speaker 1: put it in a water solution. You got your sodium
Speaker 1: chloride solution. He would use that to dissolve the unexposed
Speaker 1: silver iodide that was left on the paper, So that
Speaker 1: way the exposed stuff had already been exposed it's fine.
Speaker 1: You dissolve everything else, so now that stuff can't end
Speaker 1: up going dark, and you're left with your image and
Speaker 1: you could fix it permanently because light can no longer
Speaker 1: ruin them. And uh, Eventually the gere would find a
Speaker 1: way of producing photographs on silvered copper plate, which was
Speaker 1: kind of his his medium of choice from that point forward. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: there was another fellow, William Henry Fox Talbot, who was
Speaker 1: working on a different approach to create photographic images of
Speaker 1: scientific observations. The reason all right, he was a scientist,
Speaker 1: not he wasn't necessarily interested in photography. Originally he was
Speaker 1: interested in science. But he had a problem. He couldn't
Speaker 1: draw at all. He had like he would try all
Speaker 1: these sort of things that he would just trace using
Speaker 1: a camera obscura didn't matter. He found himself incapable of
Speaker 1: doing that. I find myself sympathizing heavily with him. I
Speaker 1: have a distinct lack of artistic ability when it comes
Speaker 1: to that. So he wanted to find a way to
Speaker 1: preserve scientific observations exactly as they were and record them
Speaker 1: in a way that would not require him to draw
Speaker 1: in any way, shape or fashion. So he started to
Speaker 1: look into a way to create photographic prints on paper,
Speaker 1: not using plates like the gear was using. So he
Speaker 1: used paper soaked in solutions of sodium chlor ride and
Speaker 1: silver nitrate in order to produce silver chloride infused paper.
Speaker 1: And if he exposed that paper to light, it would
Speaker 1: cause the exposed parts to become dark, and that would
Speaker 1: create a negative image. If he took another sheet of
Speaker 1: this and put it against the one that had been
Speaker 1: exposed and then exposed that to light, that would create
Speaker 1: a positive image on the second sheet. And for the
Speaker 1: first time, you could get hypothetically more than one print
Speaker 1: from a picture. Yes, you were not limited to whatever
Speaker 1: the original plate was. Now you could produce multiple prints,
Speaker 1: assuming that everything stayed intact through this process, which was painstaking.
Speaker 1: It was still not easy to do um and in fact,
Speaker 1: there were times where it took some experimentation with this
Speaker 1: approach to get it to work just right, because often
Speaker 1: they were having quality issues with transferring the image from
Speaker 1: the negative to the the secondary sheet. And it wasn't
Speaker 1: until nine that Talbot felt that he had really nailed it.
Speaker 1: He had actually talked with his friend, an astronomer named
Speaker 1: Sir John herschel Uh in a way to fix the
Speaker 1: negatives using sodium thiosulfate, which at the time they called
Speaker 1: sodium hypo sulfate, and found that that was what allowed it.
Speaker 1: And then then he heard about the Gear and he thought, oh,
Speaker 1: because this is the era of everyone trying to get
Speaker 1: patents for things to protect their ideas so that other
Speaker 1: folks don't just run away with him. So he immediately
Speaker 1: rushes to publication to beat the French to the punch
Speaker 1: because he knew that the French publication about the Gears
Speaker 1: work was coming. So he said, well, I can't drag
Speaker 1: my feet on this and rushed ahead. Uh and this
Speaker 1: is a story we hear over and over again in technology.
Speaker 1: It's not you know, radio was another big one like that,
Speaker 1: so television as well. So eighteen forty was the March
Speaker 1: eighteen forty was really when the first photography studio that
Speaker 1: we know of opened, And it was in New York,
Speaker 1: Oric City, and it was it was called the Dagarin
Speaker 1: Parlor and it was operated by Alexander Woolcott. And uh,
Speaker 1: so you finally had a place that was open to
Speaker 1: the public. It was no longer these uh the scientists, physicists, researchers,
Speaker 1: and others who were all interested in this concept. Now
Speaker 1: it was something that ordinary people could have some access to,
Speaker 1: the beginning of a long road to making photography very personal, yes,
Speaker 1: and also the birth of our era of narcissism. That's
Speaker 1: probably being unkind uh. And around around this time you
Speaker 1: also started to see improvements in both lens design, camera design,
Speaker 1: and the chemical processes that meant that development time had
Speaker 1: decreased significantly enough where you could sit for a portrait
Speaker 1: without having to stay absolutely still for three hours, which
Speaker 1: that's good. Uh. You know. Suddenly, suddenly portraiture became more
Speaker 1: of an attainable thing for families, and it became very
Speaker 1: popular pretty early on, especially by the eighteen sixties to
Speaker 1: the eighteen eighties. It became it was a huge movement
Speaker 1: at that point, and there are lots more things that
Speaker 1: happened from that point forward. Obviously, there was the development
Speaker 1: of Calow type, which is a negative development process that
Speaker 1: Talbot had created that made photography on paper more practical
Speaker 1: by reducing the exposure times down to one minute. Pretty incredible.
Speaker 1: At the time, Stereoscopic photography became a thing that's when
Speaker 1: you take two images using cameras or lenses that approximate
Speaker 1: the distance of a person's eyes. You did, and that
Speaker 1: was very popular during the Civil War. Yes, it was exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you would take you would take these two images and
Speaker 1: then you would use something called usually called a stereoscope,
Speaker 1: which was essentially a kind of a pair of glasses
Speaker 1: held the two images at a certain distance from your eyes,
Speaker 1: so when you looked at it, it creates the illusion
Speaker 1: of depth. It's essentially a primitive three D and a
Speaker 1: lot of them. You could adjust the lenses back and
Speaker 1: forth until the image came in focus for you, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Because of course not everyone is like our Our focal
Speaker 1: points are a little different. Uh. It's the same thing
Speaker 1: that we see now with various headsets where you have
Speaker 1: ways to adjust the lenses so that if your eyes
Speaker 1: are a little set, a little further apart or a
Speaker 1: little closer together, because a tiny difference from the average
Speaker 1: can mean you have a very different experience than someone
Speaker 1: who is closer. To the end, you can still do
Speaker 1: the exact same thing on a digital s l R
Speaker 1: through the viewfinder. Everybody can just set it up for
Speaker 1: because sometimes you'll pick up someone else's and and you're like, wow,
Speaker 1: this person has very different eyes than I do. And
Speaker 1: also you can get a very similar effect to this
Speaker 1: using Uh there there are apps on phones now that
Speaker 1: do essentially the same thing that this is doing, only
Speaker 1: they're using the the software in an app that like
Speaker 1: a Google Cardboard as an example, where you actually go
Speaker 1: and you buy a little cardboard headset and you turn
Speaker 1: your phone landscape side, you activate the Google Cardboard app,
Speaker 1: you slide it into the headset, and now you've got
Speaker 1: your own little virtual reality headset. It's based on the
Speaker 1: exact same principle as this photography. It's just in that
Speaker 1: case you're talking about more like video animation that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff rather than still photography. But it's the same idea.
Speaker 1: Then there was the wet Colodeon process, which I don't
Speaker 1: know if I'm even saying that correctly. Yes, oh excellent,
Speaker 1: That was used to make glass negatives and was much
Speaker 1: faster than earlier methods provided that you were able to
Speaker 1: work quickly. Yeah, I mean you it kind of birth
Speaker 1: the digital I mean not that, it kind of birth
Speaker 1: the portable dark room. Yeah, because if you had everything
Speaker 1: with you, you could do it in like fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1: That's which was incredible speed compared to the previous methods,
Speaker 1: and you could have huge Yeah, so you can make
Speaker 1: enormous negative. Wow. So the challenge here is that the
Speaker 1: the method relied upon the glass retaining that that moisture
Speaker 1: on it that was used for the process, and if
Speaker 1: it dried out, then your negative was ruined. So you
Speaker 1: had to work quickly in order for you to be
Speaker 1: able to take advantage of this. But on the flip side,
Speaker 1: the process itself was very fast, so that was a
Speaker 1: big advance. And then there was an even larger one
Speaker 1: a little bit later, which was the dry plate technology.
Speaker 1: I was developed by an English physician named Wretcher Richard
Speaker 1: Leech Maddox in eight seventy one UM, which eliminates some
Speaker 1: of the drawbacks of the glass approach. You didn't have
Speaker 1: to have the plate remain wet for the whole process.
Speaker 1: That's that's kind of where I get to the point
Speaker 1: where I'm I say, all right, I'm gonna step back
Speaker 1: from the chemistry. Obviously, I could keep going to the
Speaker 1: point where a lot of the chemicals have changed into
Speaker 1: the safer ones that we use today, and also the
Speaker 1: move from glass and paper to film, but the basics
Speaker 1: of what we're needed for photo manipulation to come into play.
Speaker 1: All existed by this time. In fact, photo manipulation was
Speaker 1: already a thing before eight UM and early manipulation. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it was again it was perfectly innocent. It might be
Speaker 1: that you take an image and you look at the negative,
Speaker 1: and you realize from the negative that there is a
Speaker 1: flaw of some sort. So you might alter the negative
Speaker 1: a little bit before creating a print so that you
Speaker 1: can compensate for some error that was made. Either the
Speaker 1: exposure wasn't quite right, the lighting wasn't quite right, or
Speaker 1: the subject moved or whatever. That may be the same
Speaker 1: thing that we do today. Yeah, So it's not necessarily
Speaker 1: a sinister or unethical uh motivation to manipulate a photo,
Speaker 1: but there are those as well. So if you look
Speaker 1: at some of the earlier edits, sometimes it meant that
Speaker 1: you would alter the negative, as I had mentioned, sometimes
Speaker 1: you would alter a print um, in which case you might.
Speaker 1: In fact, early, because we were limited to black and
Speaker 1: white photography, you had some people who would present make
Speaker 1: photographs and make a make a print of a photograph
Speaker 1: or a negative rather and then turn it over to
Speaker 1: an artist who might actually add color by painting over
Speaker 1: the photograph. You want blues guys, you know you put
Speaker 1: a little pant on there. Yeah. Yeah, it's the best
Speaker 1: solution to the problem at the time. So that was
Speaker 1: a type of photo manipulation. I mean it was one
Speaker 1: that everyone was aware of, but it was still a
Speaker 1: way of manipulating the photos. Uh. You could also do
Speaker 1: things like you could do a composite uh picture where
Speaker 1: that's a little bit odd. Honestly, this was one of
Speaker 1: those things that I understand the basics of, but I
Speaker 1: don't know how it would actually happen. But generally speaking,
Speaker 1: you would use two or more negatives to produce a
Speaker 1: single print, and there were a lot of composites out
Speaker 1: there for they were done for various reasons, sometimes in
Speaker 1: order to include a person who was not able to
Speaker 1: be present at a particular photo session, or to create
Speaker 1: a particular artistic field. There's some really famous artists who
Speaker 1: composed amazing pictures using as many as fifty or more
Speaker 1: negatives in order to achieve it. And honestly, at that point,
Speaker 1: I'm like, you guys are magicians. I don't know how
Speaker 1: this works. Yeah, I mean, as far as photo montage
Speaker 1: photo manipulation goes, there are people like Jerry Yulesman who
Speaker 1: goes into a dark room, takes fifty negative, splices them
Speaker 1: up with an exact o knife and makes a print
Speaker 1: and you you can't tell. It's like someone using photoshop
Speaker 1: in their wizard, but it's all analog. But early on
Speaker 1: you had you had Matthew Brady, who I like to
Speaker 1: think of and I think a lot of people think
Speaker 1: of him this way as the first celebrity photographer who
Speaker 1: had a studio, and he took portraits of almost every
Speaker 1: politician around that period, around like the Civil War era,
Speaker 1: um and he had two very famous manipulations, one that
Speaker 1: he did not do, but one of his photographs was
Speaker 1: used for part of it. I'm guessing that's the Lincoln one.
Speaker 1: The Lincoln portrait that is his it's his head um
Speaker 1: that Matthew Brady took that photograph. It's the same one
Speaker 1: that's used on the five dollar bill exactly. And the
Speaker 1: body was of John Calhoun was a Southerner entirely, and
Speaker 1: uh it was too. It was because during Lincoln's life
Speaker 1: they felt like they didn't have enough heroic photographs of Lincoln. Yes,
Speaker 1: this is an iconic picture of what appears to be
Speaker 1: Lincoln standing in front of a desk and there's like
Speaker 1: an American flag in the picture, and uh, there's um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a it's a very striking photograph, it is.
Speaker 1: And what's really interesting to me is even back then
Speaker 1: the amount of manipulation in that photograph, Uh, that there
Speaker 1: are papers on the table, and when it was a
Speaker 1: portrait of John Calhoun, the words on the table that
Speaker 1: you could read where strict constitution, free trade, and the
Speaker 1: sovereignty of the states. But the Lincoln version says constitution,
Speaker 1: Union and the Proclamation of Freedom. That's fascinating that they
Speaker 1: were able to get to that level of granularity in
Speaker 1: the change. And and you know, there are there are
Speaker 1: lots of different ways of achieving this sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean, there was the you know, you could go
Speaker 1: to the negative and you could change the negative by
Speaker 1: splicing stuff together and then producing a print. Or you
Speaker 1: could do something where you're literally cutting and pasting, but
Speaker 1: you're doing it on the print and then you take
Speaker 1: a photograph of the print developed that and that becomes
Speaker 1: your new photographs. So in other words, you can take
Speaker 1: two pictures and you literally cut out the image of
Speaker 1: something that you want from one paste it over top
Speaker 1: the image that already exists, take a photo of it,
Speaker 1: develop it, and that could be a way of doing
Speaker 1: it too. That's so interesting because that's something that I
Speaker 1: think a lot of people did in elementary school, is
Speaker 1: that they went through magazines for projects and I would
Speaker 1: cut out one part and put it over another part.
Speaker 1: Is very much like collage. It's yeah. And and there
Speaker 1: was the picture Matthew Brady did of Ulysses S. Grant,
Speaker 1: and that's supposed to be of him in front of
Speaker 1: his troops in City Point, Virginia, but it's not. No,
Speaker 1: it's actually three different photos all meshed together. Uh. It's
Speaker 1: it's the body of Major General Alexander M. M. Cook.
Speaker 1: And uh, then it's the head of Ulysses S. Grant
Speaker 1: on top of the body. So the body's on a horse,
Speaker 1: So it's Ulysses S. Grant on the body of this
Speaker 1: other general, major general. And the people in the background
Speaker 1: are not Union soldiers, their Confederate prisoners. Yeah, so it's
Speaker 1: it's it's that's a very interesting photo. Especially. I think
Speaker 1: that's an early example of UM. I wouldn't say that
Speaker 1: it was meant to deceive as much, but of maybe misinformation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could argue, you know, you could call it propaganda
Speaker 1: if you like. It was really meant to create again,
Speaker 1: this heroic image. In fact, a lot of the pictures
Speaker 1: that for political manipulation are really about elevating a particular
Speaker 1: person to make them seem more iconic and or or
Speaker 1: eliminate things that elevated person no longer liked. Military based
Speaker 1: for the most Oh yeah, a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of military ones. Uh. Yeah, there's also the the General
Speaker 1: Francis B. P. Blair being added to a group of
Speaker 1: of other generals, including General Sherman. So this is a group.
Speaker 1: If you see the two different photos, you'll see one
Speaker 1: where there's a group of generals sitting together, and then
Speaker 1: the second photo there's an extra general sitting way off
Speaker 1: to the right. Yeah, that was that other Matthew Brady
Speaker 1: image I was speaking of. And it's also really well done.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I mean it's he's he's definitely feels a
Speaker 1: little ostracized, but other than that, it looks like he
Speaker 1: fits it does. Yeah, maybe he wasn't. Maybe they felt
Speaker 1: like he wasn't as important. A bit over in the corner,
Speaker 1: you're gonna go sit up. The kid's table and let
Speaker 1: the adult generals talk about the war over here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it looks good. Yeah, it does look good. And
Speaker 1: that is also really interesting to me because it was
Speaker 1: clear that even early on, those photographers who are working
Speaker 1: with this medium and trying to create these composite images
Speaker 1: or manipulate these photos in some way already had an
Speaker 1: innate understanding of if I want to do this and
Speaker 1: make it look right, lighting is really important. I can't
Speaker 1: ignore the fact that a scene lit from the left
Speaker 1: and as subject who's lit from the right that I've
Speaker 1: added in later are going to look wrong. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean they're even now. There are a lot of photos
Speaker 1: released by by very professional agencies that don't take as
Speaker 1: much of that into consideration. Is even some of these
Speaker 1: people fifty years ago, right, and those images get torn
Speaker 1: apart on Reddit. You can go to Reddit and you'll
Speaker 1: just see people saying, well, this is clearly photoshop because
Speaker 1: if you look at the shadows they're on the you know,
Speaker 1: blah blah blah blah blah, you can tell that the
Speaker 1: lighting is higher into the left instead of low into
Speaker 1: the right or whatever. In some cases, it's really subtle,
Speaker 1: and uh, And it's people who have a greater attention
Speaker 1: span and better sense of detail than idea. I'll look
Speaker 1: at it go like, holy cow, you're right, Like I
Speaker 1: didn't notice it before. But yeah, there's still some other
Speaker 1: really cool ones that I can talk about. Like in
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy, photographer William H. Mummler use double exposure. So
Speaker 1: that's another way of editing and manipulating photos that we
Speaker 1: can talk about for a second. He used double exposure
Speaker 1: to create what people have dubbed spirit photography. Now, double
Speaker 1: exposure is exactly what it sounds like. It's exposing the
Speaker 1: same whatever photographic medium, whether it's film or a plate
Speaker 1: or whatever, to light twice, so you can create kind
Speaker 1: of a double image look. And usually one of those
Speaker 1: looks kind of transparent, like a weaker image than the
Speaker 1: other one. And sometimes this was used for artistic effect,
Speaker 1: like that I saw one that was of an actor
Speaker 1: who in what in his in his regular pose the
Speaker 1: darker pose, stood very tall and dignified, and in the
Speaker 1: second post he's bent over with his hands stretched out
Speaker 1: kind of like a like a classic universal monster. And
Speaker 1: the first thing I thought when I saw I was like,
Speaker 1: that's a perfect photograph if you want to get across
Speaker 1: the concept of Jekyl and hide. But that was not
Speaker 1: what the intent was from what I was reading. But
Speaker 1: as I saw it, I just thought that was the
Speaker 1: immediate reaction I had. And Uh, in this case, a
Speaker 1: mumbler used double exposures on a pretty famous person, Mary
Speaker 1: Todd Lincoln. Yes, so there's this image of Mary Todd
Speaker 1: seated and behind her is this the ghostly apparition of
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln? And he even has his hands on her
Speaker 1: shoulders and you can see through his hands to her shoulders.
Speaker 1: It's pretty effective, and it helps because he was so lanky.
Speaker 1: It really does kind of look ghoulish. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: again this is just achieved through double exposure. Some people
Speaker 1: do this just for artistic effect. There have been cases
Speaker 1: where people have used double exposure specifically to mislead or deceive,
Speaker 1: But in this case, I wouldn't. I would. I would
Speaker 1: argue that it wasn't necessarily meant to do that. It
Speaker 1: was more of a memorium for someone at least that's
Speaker 1: the implication. I feel. There were definitely ghost or spirit
Speaker 1: photographers who took it a different way, and we're claiming
Speaker 1: to get pictures of spirits. Yeah, like the ectoplasm. Uh,
Speaker 1: photography as well, just that whole I mean that that
Speaker 1: gets past photography. But there are a lot of pictures
Speaker 1: with people with cheese cloths coming out of there, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: cheese cloth. That's like that's a go to for hoaxers. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and I promise when we get to we'll probably
Speaker 1: save it for post digital. But I gotta talk to
Speaker 1: you about orbs, So we'll chat about orbs in the
Speaker 1: post digital section. But I've got my favorite story of No,
Speaker 1: it's not even photo manipulation, it's just trickery. I bet
Speaker 1: it is. Does the year nineteen seventeen kind of fit
Speaker 1: into that? Yes, we're gonna talk about the fairies. Okay,
Speaker 1: So Dylan, you don't know this about me when I was,
Speaker 1: But it's not a surprise because I was a kid once.
Speaker 1: When I was a kid, uh, and I was going
Speaker 1: to elementary school, I would check out all the books
Speaker 1: on ghosts and monsters and folklore, and I would read
Speaker 1: them cover to cover and I would check them out again. Excellent.
Speaker 1: So I will never forget when I was reading about
Speaker 1: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and two young girls and a
Speaker 1: bunch of fairies out in the woods and the two
Speaker 1: young girls were cousins or Elsie Wright and Francis Griffiths,
Speaker 1: and they had all these photographs of them sitting around
Speaker 1: in Glenn's surrounded by fairies frolicking about. Yeah, the Coddingly fairies.
Speaker 1: It was taken near Coddingly, England, famous famous hoax uh
Speaker 1: and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of course, the author of
Speaker 1: the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries. He was for a long time
Speaker 1: hardcore skeptic, but then suffered some tragedy in his life
Speaker 1: and started to turn to mysticism and spiritualists in an
Speaker 1: effort to answer questions that he could not answer himself,
Speaker 1: and there was sort of a decline. It was very
Speaker 1: kind of ironic from someone who presented a character who
Speaker 1: was as dispassionate and rationalist Sherlock Holmes to end up
Speaker 1: embracing the idea of these two girls who had managed
Speaker 1: to capture images of fairies. And it wouldn't be until
Speaker 1: near the end of their lives that they revealed that
Speaker 1: all they did was take illustration that were from books
Speaker 1: and cut them out and paced them onto cardboard and
Speaker 1: pose the cardboard around them and take photographs. So they
Speaker 1: actually didn't do any manipulation at all. Yeah, they just
Speaker 1: set a scene and did I. I think it wasn't
Speaker 1: until the late seventies or early eighties that one of
Speaker 1: them admitted to it. And then the famous skeptic James
Speaker 1: Randy also said that he was like, well, these illustrations
Speaker 1: are exactly the same as these illustrations from this book
Speaker 1: that came out in nineteen fifteen. Yeah. Yeah, he he
Speaker 1: had a book called flim Flam where he talked about
Speaker 1: it a lot. James Randy did. That was decades later, Yeah,
Speaker 1: very much later. So that's that's crazy, because they sent
Speaker 1: it that it folded a photographer named Harold Snelling, and
Speaker 1: he said quote that they were genuine, unfaked photographs of
Speaker 1: single exposure open air work showed movement and all the
Speaker 1: fairy figures and there's no trace whatever of studio work
Speaker 1: involving card are paper models, dark backgrounds, painted figures, et cetera. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he was he was writ in the sense there
Speaker 1: was single exposure, but there was no movement. They were
Speaker 1: paper figures. In fact, there are people who who when
Speaker 1: they really looked at the photos, they said, you can
Speaker 1: see evidence of some movement in the human subjects, but
Speaker 1: the fairies, who presumably would be moving much faster because
Speaker 1: some of them are like mid leap or flight or whatever,
Speaker 1: there's no blurring around them. And again, the exposure time
Speaker 1: at this point it was still relatively long, much longer
Speaker 1: than say the cameras that would be used a few
Speaker 1: decades later, and so any fast movement would be very blurry.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't come across so sharp and crisp as these
Speaker 1: photos did. But they were very compelling at the time,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people bought into it, including Sir
Speaker 1: Arthur Conan Doyle. Uh and I've got another one. In
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty four. We have a fellow by the name
Speaker 1: of Bernard McFadden who creates a technique called composed a graph.
Speaker 1: Do you know of McFadden, I don't. I don't believe.
Speaker 1: So let me take you downe the lurid, dirty, dirty
Speaker 1: path to tabloid journalism, because this is tabloid journalism at
Speaker 1: its most scheezy. So here here's McFadden. He is working
Speaker 1: on a tabloid magazine called New York Evening Graphic, which
Speaker 1: some people nicknamed porno Graphic. So what he would do
Speaker 1: is there would be news stories of various uh public figures,
Speaker 1: whether celebrities, politicians, whatever, sports stars, whatever it may be,
Speaker 1: and there'd be a story of some scandal. Like again,
Speaker 1: this is a tabloid, so they're all about scandal. What
Speaker 1: he would do is he would take images, uh like
Speaker 1: of people's faces in these stories. Then he would pose
Speaker 1: um body doubles, sometimes mannequins sometimes they were staffers of
Speaker 1: the magazine into a tableau, take a picture, and then
Speaker 1: do paste of the famous people's heads on top of
Speaker 1: the figures that he had posed, and then do things
Speaker 1: like a superimposed word balloon on top of it to
Speaker 1: express some statement that went along with the scandalous story. Wow,
Speaker 1: I mean Nino, I thought, how could it be skisier
Speaker 1: than like today's tabloids. But that's that's that's on. That's
Speaker 1: just right there. I don't know if you've ever seen
Speaker 1: have you ever seen any of the computer animated videos
Speaker 1: that come out of it's some Asian country, but it's
Speaker 1: but it's the retelling of famous story. Yeah, same principle here,
Speaker 1: except he was doing it with still photography. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: uh so that by the way, that that tabloid did
Speaker 1: not last too long. I think in the early nineteen
Speaker 1: thirties that it folded, it went bankrupt. But um definitely
Speaker 1: was one of those means of photo manipulation that gave
Speaker 1: the whole the whole concept of bad name. So there
Speaker 1: were the political ones we had talked about previously, then
Speaker 1: there there was this one where I mean, it's just
Speaker 1: the beginning of a long line of commercial uses of
Speaker 1: photo manipulation and photo editing in order to sell papers, essentially,
Speaker 1: is what it gets down to. Yeah, or or you know,
Speaker 1: to kind of cause harm to someone's image. That that
Speaker 1: that that was the genesis of that, And that's something
Speaker 1: that every time that political campaign comes around every four years,
Speaker 1: you have to be extra weary of the photographs that
Speaker 1: start circulating. Yeah. And and not only that, but you'll
Speaker 1: see artists will use it, usually transparently. I mean, the
Speaker 1: artist approach normally is not to create an image that
Speaker 1: you think is real. The artist's intent might be to
Speaker 1: make a statement about a particular person. I remember seeing
Speaker 1: one artist who had created a photograph and it was
Speaker 1: of a crowd out on the street, and then overtop
Speaker 1: the crowd was this inky looking octopus with the head
Speaker 1: of William Randolph Hurst. So obviously the comment being that
Speaker 1: Hearst is manipulating the public through the media, and obviously
Speaker 1: he's not inky no, nor does he have eight appendages.
Speaker 1: He had terrible taste in home decor. I'll say that
Speaker 1: as someone who's walked through the Hearst Castle. This was
Speaker 1: clearly a guy who had so much money. He just said,
Speaker 1: I like that thing. Put it in my house. It
Speaker 1: doesn't matter if baroque, don't care if it's if it's
Speaker 1: broken Gothic in the same room along with some even
Speaker 1: older stuff and some newer stuff, that's fine. And I
Speaker 1: who have no taste would walk through and y'all this
Speaker 1: is tacky. So we've we've talked about those. Let's talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about not not adding stuff in, but
Speaker 1: taking stuff away also. That became pretty prevalent around that
Speaker 1: same period of time, the nineteen twenties, that was a
Speaker 1: big period of time for well, World War One, World
Speaker 1: War two, that that kind of period in time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we had a lot of um of famous leaders who
Speaker 1: had finnicky attitudes towards their followers, and when they would
Speaker 1: get a little peeved that said followers, they would attempt
Speaker 1: to erase said followers. From history entirely. Not just not
Speaker 1: just execute the person. That's not good enough. They have
Speaker 1: to erase the fact that that person ever existed, including
Speaker 1: removing them from photographs. And example, yeah, sometimes you get
Speaker 1: removed from a photograph and you'd also be dead. Yes,
Speaker 1: sometimes sometimes they would kill you first and then say,
Speaker 1: all right, well, now that he's dead, let's go ahead
Speaker 1: and remove him from all the official photographs, like press photos,
Speaker 1: things like that. Big famous example of this would be
Speaker 1: a photo that originally had Nikolai Yazkov or Yeshov rather
Speaker 1: posing with Joe's Stalin. This is the Vanishing Commissar photograph
Speaker 1: and um, it's a picture of a group of gentlemen
Speaker 1: including Mr Stalin. Uh and yes Hoff and yes, I'm
Speaker 1: standing right next to um a wall that leads right
Speaker 1: over to a river, and Stalin's immediately to his right.
Speaker 1: And then the retouched photo he's gone. Yeah. An example
Speaker 1: of air brushing, Yeah, air brushing exactly. So. An airbrush
Speaker 1: is a tool that uses air to push through some
Speaker 1: form of paint or ink or whatever it may be,
Speaker 1: in order for you to do some uh, you know,
Speaker 1: analog hand controlled art. And in some cases it could
Speaker 1: be to hide something that was once there. Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: if you use photoshop today, it's the same idea as
Speaker 1: content to wear or the clones stamp just to take
Speaker 1: you know, to put texture back into the photograph where
Speaker 1: something used to be right and if you were really
Speaker 1: good at it, in my be difficult, especially on a
Speaker 1: casual glance, to notice that anything hinky has happened. There's
Speaker 1: some examples where you can look at and think, huh,
Speaker 1: if I did not know that there once was someone
Speaker 1: standing there, I never would have picked up on the
Speaker 1: fact that this photo has been altered. There are others
Speaker 1: where there might be some clues, particularly with things that
Speaker 1: have fine detail. Sometimes that will be a giveaway. L
Speaker 1: that's pretty noticeable with Gebals, well, technically without Gebels, it
Speaker 1: was originally Girbels was in the photograph. And I love
Speaker 1: that every instance that talks about this says, we don't
Speaker 1: know why. Yeah, we don't know why Hitler got mad
Speaker 1: at Gebels or what the reasoning was, or why he
Speaker 1: decided to erase him from this photo. He just did.
Speaker 1: And it's not done particularly well because there's a blob. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Stalin one is a little more convincing. Mostly because
Speaker 1: the water in the background is a very light, like
Speaker 1: the sunlight is hitting it, so it's harder to see
Speaker 1: that there was once a form there um. But some
Speaker 1: of the other ones are a lot or obvious by
Speaker 1: the way. The Stalin one, when I see the before
Speaker 1: and after pictures, to me, it just feels like one
Speaker 1: moment Stalin's there next to him, and the next moment,
Speaker 1: Stalin just pushes him off into the river, which somewhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not that far off from the truth because he
Speaker 1: did have him executed. So uh. And I don't mean
Speaker 1: to laugh about that. I don't think it's funny, but
Speaker 1: I but it is one of those images where you
Speaker 1: just look at and you you know, it lends itself
Speaker 1: to that kind of thought. Uh. And Hitler and Stalin
Speaker 1: were not the only ones to do this. Mounts a
Speaker 1: tongue did it. He had a famous photo where there
Speaker 1: was a supporter named Poku who was posed among I
Speaker 1: think they were like originally there were four people in
Speaker 1: the photograph and then three Poku was removed. Uh, Poku
Speaker 1: fell out of favor, and you can tell that this
Speaker 1: one was manipulated to there's uh, there's a background behind
Speaker 1: where Poku was standing that has mysteriously gotten really blobby
Speaker 1: and dark, and it's not the same color as the
Speaker 1: rounding wood in the structure that's there. So if you
Speaker 1: look at the first photo where you can see where
Speaker 1: the wood is a certain standard color all the way
Speaker 1: through up to the point where you can't see anymore
Speaker 1: because pocus in the way, and the other one looks
Speaker 1: all blobby, You're like, something's wrong here. It's also weird
Speaker 1: when it's you. You see like a lineup of people
Speaker 1: and then you wonder, like, why are they standing like that? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Can I talk about my favorite? Sure, it's the one
Speaker 1: of Mussolini. Have you seen this one where he's on
Speaker 1: a horse and he's holding a sword up to the
Speaker 1: sky and uh. In the original there's a horse handler, yes,
Speaker 1: standing right at the very mouth of the horse, holding
Speaker 1: the horse's head steady, and he had and removed and
Speaker 1: it's a good it's a good it's a good job.
Speaker 1: It looks it looks legitimate, but not like the artist
Speaker 1: gave the horse buck teeth or something. But just that idea, um,
Speaker 1: I think is the perfect amount of posturing for someone
Speaker 1: like that. They would definitely do something like and and
Speaker 1: That's exactly what I was saying before, with the idea
Speaker 1: that you know, to try and make certain figures seem
Speaker 1: more majestic. Uh. You know, if if you're if your
Speaker 1: identity that you are presenting to the public relies on
Speaker 1: the fact that you are this powerful figure, you don't
Speaker 1: want it seeing that you need someone there to control
Speaker 1: the horse that you're sitting on. You want it to
Speaker 1: look like you have that, you know, that amazing ability yourself,
Speaker 1: So you don't want there to seem to be any
Speaker 1: sign of weakness perceived in any way. And that was
Speaker 1: another great example of that. Um, did you did you
Speaker 1: know about the one from from a group of Russians
Speaker 1: who are erecting the Soviet flag above the Reichstag. Yes,
Speaker 1: and that in the original image, Uh, one of them
Speaker 1: has on two watches. Yeah, he has a band on
Speaker 1: his right arm that some people think was a watch,
Speaker 1: but it probably was actually a compass, so it probably
Speaker 1: was legitimately there. But the reason why of images altered.
Speaker 1: If you look at the altered image, the band has
Speaker 1: gone off the right arm, and the reasoning was that
Speaker 1: if people saw that he had a band on his
Speaker 1: right arm, they would think he must already be wearing
Speaker 1: a watch on his left arm. That's where people wear
Speaker 1: their watches. So he must have been looting the bodies
Speaker 1: of the dead and put on another watch on his
Speaker 1: other arm, and they didn't want that to be part
Speaker 1: of the image. Truth is, he probably didn't loud the dead.
Speaker 1: He probably was wearing a compass on that arm and
Speaker 1: a watch on his other arm. Idea to come to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's and and it's interesting because to me, it's interesting
Speaker 1: in that they were just trying to bypass a misinterpretation
Speaker 1: of the photo, and that, in fact the photo was
Speaker 1: probably already not indicating that this guy was a looter.
Speaker 1: It was just well, to be safe, we should probably
Speaker 1: take that out. And it's also a very small part
Speaker 1: of the photograph. Yeah, it's This is not like a
Speaker 1: close up on the man's wrist. In fact that you
Speaker 1: have to look really closely to notice it. But they
Speaker 1: were concerned and so they did. And then the next
Speaker 1: one I have is actually you you mentioned him uh
Speaker 1: Jerry and Uhlsman in nineteen sixty nine, one of the
Speaker 1: both most most striking photos I've seen. That again was
Speaker 1: presented without it being you know, it's not meant to
Speaker 1: deceive or misrepresent. It's an artistic expression and it is
Speaker 1: this amazing photo of trees that are suspended in the air,
Speaker 1: complete with roots systems, and it's gorgeous. And if if
Speaker 1: you haven't seen his work, I would suggest looking at
Speaker 1: it because this surreal and and impeccably done. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: is amazing to look at. I I was, and I'm
Speaker 1: not generally speaking of visual arts kind of guy um
Speaker 1: one of my other flaws, but when I saw this,
Speaker 1: I just couldn't help but really appreciate the mass story
Speaker 1: of the art that it would take to produce such
Speaker 1: an image. It's interesting because his wife is as good
Speaker 1: at photoshop as he is in the dark room. Interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll have to talk more about that in part two. Um.
Speaker 1: So there's some other examples we can give, Like there's
Speaker 1: there's the famous National Geographic UH cover in nWo. Push
Speaker 1: the pyramids closer together for a better composition of GI Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The the original photo was done in sort of a
Speaker 1: landscape mode, and of course in order to put it
Speaker 1: onto a cover of a magazine, they needed to be
Speaker 1: more portraits, so they squished them together. So if you
Speaker 1: look the pyramids are they appear to be geographically closer
Speaker 1: to one another than they are in reality, and some
Speaker 1: people began to criticize the magazine for saying, you're you're
Speaker 1: misrepresenting reality. You're putting this forward as if this is
Speaker 1: the way it looks, and this is not how it looks.
Speaker 1: And in fact, um, they got a new director of
Speaker 1: photography who said that, um, everyone in that g thought
Speaker 1: that this was the wrong decision. After it went up,
Speaker 1: the this was a mistake, not a mistake in the
Speaker 1: sense of oops, we did this, but more like that's
Speaker 1: something that we should not do because it doesn't reflect
Speaker 1: the mission of our magazine. And so they had essentially
Speaker 1: made a statement saying we're not going to do that ever. Again,
Speaker 1: that's one of the last pre digital cases I can
Speaker 1: I can think of. Yeah, the most of the ones
Speaker 1: I think of certainly happened after the digital era begins,
Speaker 1: like the really famous ones. Obviously there are countless examples
Speaker 1: that are out there, But that's the last one I
Speaker 1: have of the really uh, the notable ones in the
Speaker 1: pre digital era. And now there were some others that
Speaker 1: happened in the post digital era that probably still used
Speaker 1: some old school approach, Like I'm thinking specifically of a
Speaker 1: TV guide car that will talk about in part two.
Speaker 1: But let me ask you this, Dylan. Have you have
Speaker 1: you as a photographer, uh apbled in some of these
Speaker 1: techniques for whatever purpose almost every day? Yeah? Yeah, since
Speaker 1: I don't do photojournalism, Um, I'm not trying to do
Speaker 1: anything that I don't believe is ethical. Um, but let's
Speaker 1: say that for example, here at how stuff works, I've
Speaker 1: taken photographs of the staff, and everyone's a while to take.
Speaker 1: We have these great big windows that overlook uh the street,
Speaker 1: and um, it's nice to post people and from them
Speaker 1: because there's a great light in that area. And so
Speaker 1: I'll take a portrait of one of our hosts in
Speaker 1: front of that window, and then I'll upload it onto
Speaker 1: the computer and I'll realize, oh, there's some cars on
Speaker 1: the road right there. I don't want those cars right there.
Speaker 1: I remove the cars. Or I took a photograph of
Speaker 1: a couple of our hosts in front of the apartment
Speaker 1: building across the street, and I thought, well, the name
Speaker 1: of the apartment building isn't part of our brand, so
Speaker 1: I should just take it out. Things like that, it's
Speaker 1: just cleaning it up some and things like that. I
Speaker 1: know happen every day. I think that now photo manipulation
Speaker 1: is probably a little bit like auto tune, where you
Speaker 1: might not know it, but almost every major release you
Speaker 1: here has at least a little bit of auto tune. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the original purpose of auto tune was to be unnoticed.
Speaker 1: It wasn't meant to be a a new form of performance.
Speaker 1: That's how it got that's what it got turned into.
Speaker 1: And then you had people who were behind auto tune saying, well, crap.
Speaker 1: The whole purpose of this was to make make to
Speaker 1: correct little errors and get people closer to being on
Speaker 1: key and on tune without it becoming a noticeable thing.
Speaker 1: And now you guys are are are pushing this into
Speaker 1: something else. Not that that isn't legitimate. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think it's always important to recognize that art sometimes takes
Speaker 1: established processes or technologies and pushes them in new ways.
Speaker 1: And that's how you get new stuff. Yeah, you get
Speaker 1: the share effect an auto tune, or you have Andy
Speaker 1: Warhol making prints until they deteriorate over and over again
Speaker 1: on like a like a screen print, over and over again.
Speaker 1: But just like how auto tune tries to find uh,
Speaker 1: the right note between two two different notes, tries to
Speaker 1: get you to that right note. Uh. I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people put their their photographs into a light
Speaker 1: room or photoshop and they just try and get it
Speaker 1: to the right exposure, the right saturation, color correction, dodging
Speaker 1: and burning, which we can talk about in the second episode.
Speaker 1: Just small things like that that I think people have
Speaker 1: become so accustomed to that if you gave them an
Speaker 1: image right out of the camera, they would feel like
Speaker 1: it could have been improved upon. Yeah, this, to me
Speaker 1: is really the fascinating part of this, the idea that
Speaker 1: as someone who's who's a casual shutter bug at best,
Speaker 1: like I am not known for the making great composition
Speaker 1: of shots. I take pictures casually in order to capture
Speaker 1: moments to remember. And that's about it. Like, that's that's
Speaker 1: about as far as my expertise goes in that area.
Speaker 1: I have a deep appreciation for people who have a
Speaker 1: great understanding of composition, of lighting, of what needs to
Speaker 1: happen on the camera side in order to capture the
Speaker 1: moment that you intend to capture, and only that, but
Speaker 1: what has to happen on the back end after the
Speaker 1: photo has been quote unquote taken in order for you
Speaker 1: to have the finished picture represent your vision, especially as
Speaker 1: an artist. That's that to me is amazing, Like a
Speaker 1: lot I think. I think I often would think of
Speaker 1: photography the way a lot of early photographers thought about it,
Speaker 1: that photography's purpose is to capture a moment um as
Speaker 1: close to representing it in as being real as possible,
Speaker 1: like like capturing that real moment forever and fixing it
Speaker 1: in a medium so it can stay that way for
Speaker 1: the end of time. And U I don't necessarily, or
Speaker 1: at least I didn't think about the fact that sometimes
Speaker 1: the point where you push the shutter button on your
Speaker 1: camera is just the beginning, and then you have another
Speaker 1: process that follows to get to the photo that you
Speaker 1: want that actually represents your vision. There are definitely two
Speaker 1: sides of it. I mean, to have the idea of,
Speaker 1: like you said, getting a photograph, saving it for history
Speaker 1: and not touching it I think is also very important
Speaker 1: depending on the case. It's like when you get the
Speaker 1: audio of the State of the Union, or if the
Speaker 1: President makes an address, you don't cut it because that
Speaker 1: that can change context. You shouldn't do the same thing
Speaker 1: um with photojournalism or at least most people believe that.
Speaker 1: It's like there was a famous example in seventy at
Speaker 1: the Kent State shootings that there's a picture of a
Speaker 1: body on the ground and there's a woman grieving over it,
Speaker 1: and there was a pole sticking out from behind her head. Um.
Speaker 1: And someone saw that photograph and took the pole out.
Speaker 1: And does it change the context of the photograph? Not particularly.
Speaker 1: It was done for compositional reasons, to make it more
Speaker 1: aesthetically pleasing. One of the things that I learned when
Speaker 1: I went to college photo photography is never have a
Speaker 1: pole behind someone's head. It's just it's just you don't
Speaker 1: do it. And yes, but if it starts there with photojournalism,
Speaker 1: if you start by removing a pole, it could only
Speaker 1: escalate from there. Um. And you know, you get to
Speaker 1: a point where you're like, all right, it was a
Speaker 1: pole in this case. All right, it was someone's ring
Speaker 1: in this case, which changes the context depending upon the
Speaker 1: culture or it was, you know, removing an entire person
Speaker 1: and erasing that person's presence from an actual historical moment.
Speaker 1: I mean, it does become a slope, right, And if
Speaker 1: when people find out it raises more questions than it
Speaker 1: never really answers, sure, because then you start questioning the
Speaker 1: motivations behind the action, and then you think, well, what
Speaker 1: are your ulterior motives for making these alterations to this photograph?
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, we've explored some of that here.
Speaker 1: In some cases it was meant to mislead people specifically,
Speaker 1: in some cases it was a matter of ego, uh,
Speaker 1: and sometimes ego to the point of of megalomaniac maniake
Speaker 1: the egos, I mean Stalin and and Moult s Tong
Speaker 1: and the biggest egos of the twentieth century Hit Learned
Speaker 1: mostly and yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean those are big
Speaker 1: egos and to the point where if you want someone gone,
Speaker 1: you don't just kill them, but you erase all record
Speaker 1: of them. That's insane really to me. But as far
Speaker 1: as people who would have like who would have a
Speaker 1: history of having photos manipulated, yeah, it makes total sense
Speaker 1: that those would be the personalities that demand these things.
Speaker 1: And we've also, of course, there are plenty of examples
Speaker 1: of other artists and photographers who have manipulated images using
Speaker 1: pictures of people like those, uh, in order to lampoon
Speaker 1: or youse satire or some other means to make a
Speaker 1: message like there's a famous one, uh, not a particularly convincing,
Speaker 1: uh cut and paste job, but there was one where
Speaker 1: it's a picture of of of someone dressed up with
Speaker 1: an apron and they're holding a clever and they're about
Speaker 1: to chop the head off of a of a bird,
Speaker 1: is a bird that represents France, and they've cut and
Speaker 1: paste Hitler's head on top of the person's head, thus
Speaker 1: representing Hitler's approach to attacking and and conquering France. And
Speaker 1: it was meant as a political statement, And it wasn't
Speaker 1: meant to mislead obvious, it wasn't. It wasn't. The intent
Speaker 1: wasn't to suggest, like look at this weird picture I
Speaker 1: got of Hitler. It was obviously to make a statement. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: so lots of different reasons for this. Now this is
Speaker 1: really neat because it does show the amount of work
Speaker 1: necessary to edit and manipulate photos. Sometimes it meant taking
Speaker 1: a risk that you might ruin the negative that you
Speaker 1: had created. Not all of these manipulations when you had
Speaker 1: to go back to the negative and make some changes, No,
Speaker 1: all of them turned out great. And there is no
Speaker 1: undo button. Yeah, so we have no way of knowing
Speaker 1: how many potentially historical images we've lost as a result
Speaker 1: of an error made in the manipulation process, it may
Speaker 1: be that there are quite a few that would have
Speaker 1: been iconic photographs that we have never seen because of that. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's a different story in the post digital age, and
Speaker 1: that's what we're going to cover in our next episode.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna wrap up this one. Dylan, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for joining me for this episode. Thank you.
Speaker 1: It will be almost as if you never left. We
Speaker 1: record the next one. And guys, if you have any
Speaker 1: suggestions for future episodes, you can always write me. My
Speaker 1: email address is text stuff at how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter or tumbler.
Speaker 1: I use the handle text stuff hs W at all
Speaker 1: three of those. And I will talk to you again
Speaker 1: Leason for more on this and bastings and other topics.
Speaker 1: Is it has to Works dot com.