"An unemployed hipster tweeting from his iPhone outside a shuttered financial firm. New York, New York, April 2010. Reproduction from JPEG. Photo by Jack Smith. Holographic Storage Division, Library of Congress."
It's funny how the documentary technology affects how we view the past. These photos seem much more cheerful than the black & white images that we usually associate with the Depression and WW2. If it weren't for the car & clothing styles, they could be taken today.
I wonder if our grandchildren will view our still, color photos the same way. Life was so drab and depressing before motion & 3D!
I agree - although I view it a bit different. I always feel a disconnect with black and white photos, as if it's something that happened centuries ago or not at all. These photos somehow make it feel more "real".
The dirt is definately more noticable -- I am just depressed at how dirty things are in those pictures. Of course, it isn't really any cleaner in rural/industrial settings today...
It did not appear that the man work worked in the carbon plant had the benefit of a respirator -- at least the dirt patterns on his face didn't show any signs of a nose/mouth covering. Imagine how many government regulations this same factory would be in violation of today.
Some of those images are almost haunting. The family living in the dugout home... those meals look just like the ones my great grandmother prepared everyday. One mason jar of green beans, a jar of milk (she always transferred store bought milk into jars), home made biscuits (key ingredient was lard :|), and a portion of rice. She was a nurse during the time of the depression. It almost gives a glimpse of where she got some of her habits. When you're the poor all you know to do is work and grow your own food... she had an excellent garden! She lived like this until she died at 93 in '98. (She was filthy rich from investing during the time of the depression and cashing out... no one even grasped how much money this woman had)
On a side note, the locomotives reminded me of the visual imagery that crossed my mind while reading Atlas Shrugged.
Not sure which slides you were looking at but 3(old guy on the left is arguably larger than he should be), 12(portly gent on the right), and 66(a fine double chin if ever I saw one) have overweight people in them. Also it was the great depression not exactly known as a time of plenty.
I think the point is that it is almost impossible to take a picture today like #6 without getting one overweight individual in it. Definitely a different world back then.
You clearly don't live near me. It would be easy to take such a picture in Chinatown, DC (unless I was around... ;) ) without overweight people in it. The vast majority of people I see on the street going to and from work are pretty thin.
I think relating this so called downturn to the Depression is impossible for any of us (and media) to do. From the stories I heard from my grandparents and others, I'm not sure if the generation today would do so well in a true great depression.
People in the US opt to be overweight or to ignore that they are overweight, as is their right. We have an abundance of tasty, high-calorie food, and many people prefer constantly satisfying their desires to exercising and eating healthy, both of which are difficult to sustain and may not provide a benefit that people realistically value over a shortened, satisfying life. Fat people spend money on weight-loss measures (some don't), not because they dislike their lifestyle, but because they want to change their appearance. They give up when they decide the boon to their appearance is not worth the damage to their lifestyle, which they value.
I guess that the people in the pictures would, very nearly, be statistically as fat as we are had they access to the same food and leisure. I think a lot has changed about our culture since then, but I don't suppose the amount of self-control that people possess has decreased significantly, if at all. This to me would be the more interesting discussion than whether or not we are fatter than people from the depression, which is clear. Certainly our marketing culture is responsible for much of the overeating that occurs now. But what about the people themselves? Does a depression era person have a smaller or larger reserve of self-control, and would they bother to allot a portion of it to weight-control? I think we would agree that people are more selfish these days. Whether people are less able to set and achieve goals is a another question. Is a given adult more or less capable of keeping his hand out of the treat jar?
The original comment speaks volumes in its terseness, so I will lay it out: the comment poses that people now are less capable of controlling themselves than they were back then. (The alternatives: to indict the role of food in our culture, or to celebrate our improved capacity for producing food, are not what it is intended.) If so, then I would like to see that demonstrated.
As a side discussion to poke fun at the negative implications of the statement: If obese people enjoyed a legally protected status (as many other minorities do), would you still feel compelled to make the same comment? What might a discussion protecting obese people look like?
Go find poor rural places in the developing world today (or even more so 20 years ago), and you’ll see scenes that look pretty much identical to these. Places where people don’t have enough work or enough to eat, and what work they do have is hard manual labor, tend to be full of skinny people.
We view it as hard compared to what we have now. However, not having that comparison -- did people back then actually think life was hard? Or was it just normal?
I guess some cultures and countries regard photographs as just documentary evidence of what the subject looks like. Or what the situation is like. If everyone is dancing and singing, then there would probably be lots of laughing people in the shot. But is accidental, not because the photographer is trying to tease out a smile by saying something silly like "cheese". And then, if it is just a portrait, then it makes sense to have a neutral expression...
I encountered this clash of cultures when I came to America from Eastern Europe. Everyone looking at my family photos immediatly assumed everyone was very unhappy because the subjects don't smile. I usually got the "Oh so sad, everyone was so unhappy, it was probably because of communism...?". Nevermind that it is a picture of a large family picnic, with plenty of food, kabobs grilling in the background -- basically all the indications that everyone was having a good time (and I know they were because I was there as well). Yet, I always get the "unhappy people" sympathy comment. It always baffles me...
My mom was in born in 1929, and she once told me that people didn't smile in photographs in that era because shutter speeds were slow. Smiles would end up as blurs, so people were encouraged not to do it.
From various Kodak publications of the period, recommended exposures in the 1920's on "normal" film would indicate a "modern" ASA rating of 25-50 with normal developement. The sensitivity of generally available films seems to have increased in the early 1930's and higher speed emulsions became also available.
Since there are readers here who may have never seen film: ASA 50 is considered on the very slow, insensitive side today. ASA 200 is typical, and ASA 400+ is fast.
My mom may have meant ASA rating instead of shutter speed. Actually, both, right? If you have slow ASA film, you'd need to keep the shutter open longer to expose it, right?
You have to juggle three parameters when taking photos: aperture (How much light does the lens let through?), shutter speed (How long will the lens be kept open?) and film speed (How sensitive is the film to light?).
Slow film speeds inevitably lead to larger apertures or slower shutter speeds or both. The brightness of lenses is limited which means that the shutter speed (which you can take up to years with pinhole cameras if you really want to) has to do all the heavy lifting and exposure times can quickly get out of hand.
A little example: Say you are shooting with ASA 25 film and your light-meter tells you that, given your aperture, you need a shutter speed of 15 seconds. (You would get values in this range at dusk or inside at night with a normal lightbulb illuminating the room.) To bring that down to a more manageable quarter second (you will still need a tripod but capturing smiles might be quite a bit easier) you would need crazy fast ASA 1600 film (only to give you a sense of perspective on that: you could buy the first ASA 1000 color film only in 1982).
This is actually one area where digital photography handily beats film. A fancy and expensive digital camera like the Nikon D3S will let you shoot photos up to ISO 102400 (for the purpose of this comment let ISO = ASA) which will bring your shutter speed down from a quarter second to 1/256 of a second. Well, those ISO 102400 photos will look like crap, but you will get usable results up to ISO 12800 [+] (that would be 1/32 of a second, you could even pull that one off handheld if you really tried). Unthinkable with film. That’s the reason why digital point and shoots can get away with fairly insensitive minuscule sensors.
Long story short: You mom is absolutely correct when she says that shutter speeds were slow. The reason for that were slow films which cause slow shutter speeds (given a fixed aperture).
I bet she was referring to the shutter speed. People then didn't have context to know the film was slow, just like we don't call all of our digital cameras "low-resolution" although they will be in 50 years.
Cursive became bigger. If you look into the various "italic" schools of handwriting/calligraphy, you can still find courses and books on writing that way, though.
I've got that on my things-to-do after this summer...
If it weren't for the "hard-times", our perceived happiness levels are likely to be pretty similar. The people from 1940 probably looked at the black-and-white photos of the Civil War era, and thought how hard it must have been to live in a world without cars and planes.
For all we know, the next generation will think back on us 2010-folk and think "could you believe it took 5 hours to cross the country by plane?!"
"Flying Santa Behind Schedule" -- oof. Even Santa was hit by the depression! I wonder if it was social engineering for kids to expect late presents (or none)?
Given that URL I thought I'd see some flickr-style years-in-the-future Expires and Cache-control headers. The article is dated July 26, but 1281011079 (assuming this is an 'epoch time') is today, August 5. It's almost like they went out of their way to defeat caches by tacking on that query string.
My dad has a picture of him sitting in his one-room school house around 1942 that looks almost exactly like the one in this post. He has his shoes on in the picture which I guess was a rarity - the teacher used to make him take them off at the door because of all the cow crap he stepped in milking the cow before school.
It's kind of strange to see these - but it is especially striking as I share the surname "Caudill" with the #1 and #17. I never thought of it as very common, so perhaps I'm related somehow.
Some very neat photos in there though, and interesting to see the world/country in a different phase.
Quite. The lowest point in the state is something like 2,500 feet and average is around 5,500. Been in snow there myself and I've only been twice. It's gorgeous.
wow. i clicked the link expecting to see how much has changed, but after viewing i've realized how little has changed. #6 (save for the lady walking in the back) looks like it could have been shot yesterday somewhere in NY.
"An unemployed hipster tweeting from his iPhone outside a shuttered financial firm. New York, New York, April 2010. Reproduction from JPEG. Photo by Jack Smith. Holographic Storage Division, Library of Congress."