First Ever Photoshop?!

[lupaglupa]

I'm looking for a future headline entry in the "Florida man..." series.

 

[ColonelBuckwalter]

I'm looking for a future headline entry in the "Florida man..." series.

I may have well been proto Florida Man.

It actually started locally. Occoee, FL, started with 'an Occoee Man's and then it spread like wildfire.

 

[USS ALASKA]

Sirs / Ma'ams - there are many photos of this type, including the one in the OP, here - https://civilwartalk.com/threads/best-worst-photo-shopped-faux-and-just-plain-silly-images.150456/

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

 

[Rhea Cole]

"The Valley of Death."

Without cannon balls on the road, or…

… with cannonballs on the road.

The Crimean War, 1853 - 1856 was the first to be photographed. The photographer who recorded the "Valley of Death" was faced with a dilemma.

As you might imagine, Cannon balls were a tripping hazard for men & horses. It was standard procedure to clear them up after a battle.

In the first image, the Russian cannon balls that decimated the Light Brigade had been cleared off the road.

In the second the photographer & assistant scattered balls on the road for dramatic effect.

Today, a photo journalist who did that & did not label the image as staged would be violating professional standards. Not so in the 1850's.

At that time, photographers worked like artists did. They composed scenes for visual effect. Needless to say, an image of an empty stretch of road was no where near as dramatic as one strewn with cannon balls. One fires the imagination, the other does not.

As all good Southern storytellers know, "Don't let the facts get in the way of the story." Compare the vainglorious paintings & famous poem describing the debicle with the stark reality of that desolate stretch of empty road. The photograph with the cannonballs was no more a "lie" than any other artistic rendering was.

The person who created the montage at the head of this thread was part of a tradition ubiquitous in the 19th Century.

Images such as this one from Leslie's Illustrated Magazine were painstakingly engraved on end grain woodblocks made up of applewood, ideally. They look exactly like a checkerboard. Montages of drawings & photographs were used to create dramatic compositions like this. Does anybody claim that this is a lie? Of course not.

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Sidebar: Beginning with the 1860's, the innovative rotogravure printing process & photographic images created the publications we see today. The most famous rotogravure images of the Civil War were the millions of dollars worth of Confederate bills created as souvenirs by a druggist. Samuel Upham purchased the rotogravure plates from a news paper article & had clearly marked souvenir Confederate $10 bills printed that he sold as a souvenir novelty.

Soon he was filling massive orders from enterprising individuals who trimmed the souvenir imprint off the margin & put them into circulation. He made $250,000 in 2024 dollars & contributed to the devaluation of Confederate currency.

Link:

https://thebhc.org/sites/default/files/beh/BEHprint/v028n2/p0313- p0324.pdf

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From the very beginning, montages were ubiquitous in publications of all kinds. With the advent of combining photographs with the rotogravure process, the kind of montage being discussed in this thread brought the photomontage to a whole new level.

This article documents the evolution of the photomontage.

Link:

Composite Imagery and the Origins of Photomontage, Part II: The Formalist Strain

THE MOST BASIC CHARACTERISTIC of photomontage is the joining of two or more individual photographic images, as parts, to form another complete, different image. Sometimes photomontage is coupled with hand…

www.artforum.com

The clumsy photomontage on this thread never fooled anybody who looked carefully, nor was it intended to.

 

[Reconstructed Rebel]

More photoshopped photos to peruse-

Smiling Civil War leaders! | Altered Period Photos

Fun times with the FaceApp

civilwartalk.com

 

[Old Soldier]

What is often forgotten was that any images appearing in print were not 'photographs'. As Rhea Cole says, the only cheap way of mass-producing images was by engraving (cut) onto end-grain woodblocks and using those within the printing frame. Quality was VERY variable, but for the conflict was the only way of getting images into print quickly. The tighter the grain, the better the image. Harpers Weekly and the Illustrated London New (weekly magazines) made a point of using good engravings. They printed the same way as type - ink on raised surfaces.

Wood cut (Confederate Recruiting.) Woodcut (Battle)

The other method, etching, an image etched by acid in stone or metal, required much skill - and money. Etchings were more detailed, but printed by leaving ink in the hollows(!). They were generally used for more expensive books, as a 'Plate' and framed pictures and were often colored. (The ink often lasted longer than the colored tints used!).

Etched onto copper plate (quite rare)

Fine engraving onto metal, colored. (Stonewall Jackson)

The main artistic disadvantage with photos was the fact that they had to be posed - no real action photos appeared until the 1920s when exposure times were brought down to a fraction of a second. There was no method to take a photo to print at the time.

 

[Rhea Cole]

In response to a PM.

What would I have done with image of the Valley of Death? There was no way to crop photographs at that time, that being said, I would have concentrated on the hundreds of cannon balls. It curls my toes to imagine what that volume of iron smashing into closely packed men & horses would have been like… the sheer horror that those inert spheres represented is disturbing. I have seen too many drone strikes in that same area to have a proper objective emotional distance.