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Roger Beal's avatar

To establish my cred to comment on this article, I'll note that I sold my first commercial photo sixty (60) years ago. I have many years' experience in wet darkroom work and in the stripping department (yes, that's what the negative prep area is called) in a lithography shop. I'm a collector of historical images and of "real photo" and hand-tinted postcards from 1890 thru about 1920. Some things to consider:

1) Retouching was done during the "pictorial" era in photography to make an image more presentable and saleable - that applies especially to postcards. (The practice continued into the 1960s, where many postcards of different geographic locations all have exactly the same blue sky and fluffy clouds: https://youtu.be/MgpQXz34bqs )

2) Outline-type retouching was done for news photos to compensate for the relatively low contrast of 1920s-50s printed photos on soft newsprint. The retoucher would add a bold line around parts of the subject that needed to be highlighted and clearly separated from the background.

3) Retouching negatives made by portrait photographers was done to enhance the beauty / glamour of the subject -- identical to the Photoshop macros today that enhance eye makeup and cheekbones. This was done to satisfy the vanity of the person photographed and the buyer of the photo.

4) Retouching was a high-dollar, high-skilled subtrade within commercial photography. Anyone with the patience and steady hands to work on negatives over a light table all day, often earned more than the other folks in the darkroom.

5) Lithography strippers retouch negatives after they've been put in place on the carrier sheet, which is then contact-printed on a photosensitized metal plate, then developed and fixed, then mounted on the printing press. This retouching is done to remove scratches, dots, and any other marks that do not belong in the finished photo.

My point is that not all retouching has deception as its goal. Much of it was designed to enhance the pictorial and sharpness qualities of an image, and to satisfy the demands of the image buyer.

Mara's avatar

The pictures are definitley all faked for whatever nefarious purposes. I have seen a documenatry about the photographs from WW2 a few years back. The ones you showed were also part of it. That was clearly to paint normal men to be horrible monsters and so to justify a genocide on the german people and all that followed. The war had absolutely nothing to do with justice or the jews or bringing democracy to Europe. I will not say anymore, because there is transatlantian dictated laws in my country to prevent me from doubting the narrative.

But my conclusion is, if they faked those for propaganda purposes and "no man, no problem"-Stalin did as well, why should the rest of them just be made to look nicer? It makes no sense to take a picture and then totally alter it. There are things, we should not see and there are things that we are supposed to think are there, when they weren't. People for instance..... Imakes me think of tartaria and the mud flood.

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