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 h…
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.
Yes, a great comment. Early photos were retouched routinely, for the sake of "beauty" and clarity, and this practice continued through the years. This retouching was considered an art, and professional photographers typically offered this service. My high school graduation photo (1960s) was retouched so that I looked like a wax caricature. I had my photo taken in a Middle Eastern country for a work permit, and I looked like a space alien - and the photographer was tremendously pleased with the result. Of course now they don't retouch the negatives or prints but manipulate digital images.
One of my mentors, who was much older that I was, asked me to touch up - aka change - a photo to be published in a book she was working on, because she said the photo didn't correctly show a feature she knew had been there, and which was germane to the argument she wanted to make. So with reluctance, I painted the feature onto the photo, which was then reshot, and the doctored photo was published. So I myself was a photo-retouch artist. They made entire paint sets for retouching B&W photos. That was in the late 1970s. Her impression of what constituted a viable photo involved the possibility of retouching, with which she had no problem, and yet she was a very honest scholar. She no doubt grew up with the concept and considered it permissible.
Meanwhile, they are now Photoshopping almost every photo that appears in the news or online. ALL the crowd photos - in a demonstration, march, or really any gathering - have people "pasted" in. If you look at them, you will invariably see large people next to small people, body parts cut off or overlapping, and all manner of absurdities. I would say that probably NONE of the photos we now see in the media are authentic representations of reality. And yet most viewers take them all at face value.
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.
Yes, a great comment. Early photos were retouched routinely, for the sake of "beauty" and clarity, and this practice continued through the years. This retouching was considered an art, and professional photographers typically offered this service. My high school graduation photo (1960s) was retouched so that I looked like a wax caricature. I had my photo taken in a Middle Eastern country for a work permit, and I looked like a space alien - and the photographer was tremendously pleased with the result. Of course now they don't retouch the negatives or prints but manipulate digital images.
One of my mentors, who was much older that I was, asked me to touch up - aka change - a photo to be published in a book she was working on, because she said the photo didn't correctly show a feature she knew had been there, and which was germane to the argument she wanted to make. So with reluctance, I painted the feature onto the photo, which was then reshot, and the doctored photo was published. So I myself was a photo-retouch artist. They made entire paint sets for retouching B&W photos. That was in the late 1970s. Her impression of what constituted a viable photo involved the possibility of retouching, with which she had no problem, and yet she was a very honest scholar. She no doubt grew up with the concept and considered it permissible.
Meanwhile, they are now Photoshopping almost every photo that appears in the news or online. ALL the crowd photos - in a demonstration, march, or really any gathering - have people "pasted" in. If you look at them, you will invariably see large people next to small people, body parts cut off or overlapping, and all manner of absurdities. I would say that probably NONE of the photos we now see in the media are authentic representations of reality. And yet most viewers take them all at face value.
Well-stated. The art of "deep fakery" is many decades old.