Ethics? What ethics? State-of-the-art photo retouching tips from 1946

Ethics? What ethics? State-of-the-art photo retouching tips from 1946

The find of the day: An instruction manual on how to retouch photos for publication, published in 1946.

The PetaPixel blog posted a number of pages from this book, Shortcuts to Photo Retouching For Commercial Use, by Raymond Wardell. PetaPixel’s Michael Zhang writes:

Think of it as a “Photoshop 101″ book for photographers who came more than half a century before us.

Among the examples Michael posts is this horrifying one entitled “Order from chaos.”

That might be good for advertising use. But we visual journalists can only cringe.

Thanks to Alan Stamm for the tip.

This sort of thing has been around forever, of course. The more extensive your newspaper’s library of vintage photos, the more likely you are to have come across some of them. Five years ago, the L.A. Times‘ Larry Harnish posted this picture of Dodgers announcers Jerry Doggett andVin Scully from the Sept. 2, 1958, edition of the Times.

But look at Scully’s right arm. It’s in front of Doggett. But Scully is seated on the other side of him. Clearly, something fishy is going on.

Sure enough, here’s the entire picture as it appears in the LAT files.

That’s quite a bit of airbrushing and old-school cut-and-paste going on. Larry wrote:

As Gary Metzker would say: “They are out of control.” When I showed this to Davan Maharaj, he called it “X-acto Shop.” Anybody who did this today would be out on their ear.

Yet, people tend to think of “Photoshopping” as a recent thing. Not only is it not recent, it’s only within our lifetimes this sort of thing has become frowned upon.

One more quick example: This famous picture from the Kent State incident in May 1970. You’ve all seen it, of course.

But that image has been manipulated. In the original frame, a fence post appears to grow out of the woman’s head.

Unfortunate. But you have to keep that fence post there. We don’t manipulate documentary news photographs. At least, we don’t manipulate them now.

Yet, it’s the manipulated version of that photo that you typically see reprinted.

And even this picture — arguably one of the most famous photographs taken in human history…

…is, in fact, manipulated. Turns out, Neil Armstrong takes pictures about as well as my wife does. In the original, he clipped off the top ofBuzz Aldrin‘s head. Here’s the full frame of Neil’s shot.

Yet, journalists continue to use the manipulated version of that photo. I’m not quite sure why. I’ve been sounding the alarm on this for years (find the most recent example of that here).

Some of you have seen plenty of examples like this in my Visual Ethics slideshow. If you’ve not seen it, feel free to download the Powerpoint presentation here.