After all the work was done it was startling to pull back and view at
thumbnail. It's possible to look at the unrestored file and seek
visual reminders of "this was long ago"; restoration takes away that
comfortable little refuge.
I wonder whether it's still possible to identify him.
On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 2:27 PM, Durova <nadezhda.durova(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Thanks for the kind words, David.
With digital restoration, often one encounters elements about the
original that are unknowable. A couple of examples follow.
Segregated drinking fountain, North Carolina, 1938:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Segregation_1938.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Segregation_1938b.jpg
The child is pushing away from the fountain and rotating on his hip
with one foot raised, turning to get away from the photographer.
Which suggests that the shot was taken very quickly: not much time
to get an ideal composition.
What was the photographer's intention? Many Americans of the 1930s
had a view of the subject that would be intolerable today. Farm
Security Administration photographers were discouraged from
photographing racial issues so the fact that this image exists
raises intriguing possibilities.
That's a courthouse at upper left. It stayed in frame while the
crop took out the curb, outbuilding, and power lines. There are
several ways to explain the reasons for this crop in terms of
overexposure and compositional principles, one of which is the
dynamic effect of diagonal lines. There's a diagonal from the
courthouse to the segregated fountain sign to the child: cropping
kept that diagonal but moved the center off the child to a midpoint
between the sign and the child, enhancing tension between the two.
I don't know what John Vachon thought when he took this, but to my
eye this is about the difference between law and justice. It's
possible that I changed the entire POV of the photograph.
----
Early this year when I worked on the Wounded Knee Massacre
restoration (which discovered four human remains and became a minor
news story), it was a pattern of five dark spots which seemed to
follow the contours of the snow that led to the discovery.
http://durova.blogspot.com/2009/01/discoveries-and-tough-decisions.html
These finds don't quite happen accidentally. I browse through
thousands of files looking for ones that might have something
interesting in them. That original had an unusual composition: why
were there several large bundles in the foreground? The
bibliographic record is often underdocumented, so subtle cues
within the image itself may be all one ever has to go by.
Old photographs often have thousands of dust and dirt specks. So
how does one tell random degradation from meaningful information?
Dust from blood?
Genuine photographic elements often look slightly different from
print damage, but software plugins aren't trustworthy at telling
the difference. Intelligent decisions often require a knowledge of
historic context.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lynching.jpg
Yes, it's a lynching. His feet are only a few inches above the
forest floor; his shadow nearly meets his foot. Beneath him
there's also a discoloration. Is that a stain on the negative or
real part of the scene? Well, it seems to be directly beneath
something dripping from his left shoe.
There appears to be a pattern of drip stains on the left leg of his
overalls from the ankle to the knee. Then a similar discoloration
in a circular pattern at his crotch. Could the elements be related?
People who were being hanged have been known to lose bladder
control. Yet I suspect something worse. Look at the stains on his
shoe again. That's unusually dark for a urine stain, and it shines
in the sunlight. Possibly dried blood. This man may have been
castrated.
High resolution digitized photos of lynching are hard to find.
This one happened to have the right technical specifications for
restoration; it is--within its gruesome subject--comparatively
understated. Others show more obvious mutilation, often with a
crowd of smiling vigilantes next to the corpse. The perpetrators
were hardly ever prosecuted.
I can't mention this speculation onsite because the circumstances
are unconfirmed. The man's name and the location are unknown. The
photograph was taken in 1925.
----
It helps to speak from experience when discussing digital
restoration.
-Durova
--
http://durova.blogspot.com/
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: