[WikiEN-l] Wikimedian image restorations exploited on eBay

[Durova]

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/