This is interesting, but I could do without the conspiracy theory: "But back then the desire to show the places and faces of America in the mire was controlled to fit a message."
Which is utter nonsense. They were blackholed simply because he felt they weren't good photos. Plenty of very similar photos were published.
If you browse the photos you'll see most are simply poor, or duplicate photos, and if you click through you'll find links to similar photos that were published.
@dang if you see this, could you change the url to the loc.gov link and the title to "The Black Hole Photographs: Unpublished Images from America’s Great Depression"
That's unfortunate, I find the blackholed photo much better in every single way than the wide shot. I guess that tells us more about the specific editor, the audience and context, or maybe just the stylistic choices of the day.
Yeah, it doesn't look to me like the holes are something being removed to conceal it; I don't think the holes' positioning is strategic. The way it looks to me, is that the holes are just to render the negative unusable.
That is, I think it's vandalism. Even if the focus is a bit dodgy, I don't see the point in mutilating negatives like that.
I think it's a bit extreme to call it vandalism. Presumably the editor didn't give much thought to the archival value of the "reject" photos.
It's a bit easy to armchair quarterback now, when we can preserve and access data so readily. But I suspect a contemporary editor would have had no idea that anybody would ever want to look at the b-roll.
I don't know what they used in depression era cameras, but at least with "modern" roll of film (i.e. 35mm) the "negatives" are one strip of film containing one image after the other. You don't have individual "photos" as individual physical artifacts, they're just one small part of the strip on which they're taken.
So if you're going to develop a roll of film, but don't want to develop everything, you could just mark the shots you don't want in some way (i.e. a hole punch or a marker) and you'd know to skip them.
It's a different kind of conspiracy argument, but it reminds me of the point made by moon-landing sceptics that all the photos are too well framed considering the cameras were chest mounted and hard to use.
Of course the reason for that is simple, the moon equivalent of "Aunt Ethel with half her head out of the frame" were simply never widely published. What got published were the ones that looked good.
How are you so easily making the distinction between "person in power doesn't want to post photos because he doesn't like them" and "person in power doesn't want to post photos because it shows something they don't like"?
> Plenty of very similar photos were published.
Do you have an example, from when this person was leading the organization?
> But they’re neither objects nor stains, rather punch holes made by Roy Stryker, director of the FSA’s documentary photograph program, and his team of editors. The holes marked pictures as unfit for purpose.
If you are interested in the atmosphere of those times, at least how it was seen through public media, there is a very interesting and informative docu movie called "Brother Can You Spare a Dime" from 1975, 1h 43m.
IMDB describes it as: "A nostalgic look back at the Great Depression with contemporary archival footage and film clips picturing James Cagney as an American Everyman."
I remember reading that the number one cancer ~100 years ago (e.g 1920's era) was stomach cancer.
The thinking was that everyone ate pickled or canned foods due to a lack of refrigeration. This in turn led to the stomach cancer.
I mention this in conversation when people talk about food being "better" back in the day.
It's also a reminder that "it's not the poison, it's the dose". Fermented/pickled foods are probably good for your gut biome up to some threshold but then can begin to have negative effects.
I have to check sources on this but to my recollection, the biggest reason for stomach cancer historically has been infection by Helicobacter pylori, which for decades caused duodenal/stomach ulcers in many adults with doctors only treating the symptoms instead of the underlying cause (the bacteria), because they simply didn't know how common it was as a cause of this problem. After Barry Marshall and Robin Warren showed in 1982 how it caused peptic ulcers, treatments for ulcers changed and gastric cancer rates fell from what I remember. Those two doctors even won a nobel prize for their discovery.
Life expectancy was worse, for reasons of awful (compared to now) child mortality and also because many other major diseases killed people before they could get the cancers of old age that today skew so many cancer statistics towards higher prevalence. Despite this, cancer was no stranger to the 1930s, and treatment options were virtually non-existent if it did arrive.
Furthermore, antibiotics simply didn't exist, so goodbye life or in the better case, limb, if even minor infections became bad. It was largely a firm understanding of germ theory that prevented more infection deaths at the time. Beyond that, Life expectancy in general ranged from just over 57 years in 1929 to only 63 years by the mid 1930s.
Despite your flippant claim about "processed shit" being at fault for our supposedly awful modern life, you'd generally be much better off and much healthier today, even if your diet isn't entirely perfect. Also worth mentioning: the most common causes of death during the depression were: "cardiovascular and renal diseases, cancer, influenza and pneumonia, tuberculosis, motor vehicle traffic injuries, and suicide". These were major problems then and even now some of them remain major problems just like then despite fewer processed popular diet options at that time.
you don’t have to buy processed food, what people ate 100 years ago is still readily available
life expectancy actually went up by about 6 years over the great depression (early 60s), and is generally better during recessions (though the suicide rate also goes up). Some speculation is that people work less and sleep more, have less money to spend on alcohol and other vices, and there are fewer workplace injuries
> “Vegetables are extraordinarily rich in nutrients and beneficial phytochemicals,” he reported. “They are still there, and vegetables and fruits are our best sources for these.”
Regardless, it's somewhat avoidable by buying produce from local sources or from organic farms.
Much more human effort went into making food back then. Our food is much cheaper than in the past.
(Assuming you live in the US and are middle-class.) You can eat heathy if you want to. It's your choice what you eat. You can choose to only buy unprocessed food and make everything from scratch. You can bring your own meals with you when you travel away from your home.
The fact that we have fresh vegetables imported from thousands of miles away, and plenty of frozen (but otherwise minimally-processed) food means you can have a better diet than back then. It's all about your choices.
I went to college in the late 70's, I was 6'5" and weighed 180. Then again my metabolism was crazy. Now I weigh 215. Clearly my one data point proves all...
Average lifespan actually increased during the decade before and the decade after the great depression too, so it looks like involuntary fasting had zero to do with it.
From the article:
"These pictures each contain an inky black disc of nothing. A black sun hangs with pendant menace and mystery.
But they’re neither objects nor stains, rather punch holes made by Roy Stryker, director of the FSA’s documentary photograph program, and his team of editors. The holes marked pictures as unfit for purpose."
Restoring these photographs is a perfect project for machine learning. Does anyone know a grad student or researcher who would be willing to take on a restoration project for these damaged photographs?
If you're talking about "restoring" in the sense of colorizing it: Do we really need yet another grad student to work on a colorizing-with-ML project? There's dozens of such projects already. Posting colorized black and white photos was a popular trend a few years ago, but nowadays it's died down.
If you're talking about "restoring" in the sense of fixing the holes: I doubt ML can do anything when a huge section of the picture is missing. Any detail you put in would be hallucinated and not representative of reality.
> Any detail you put in would be hallucinated and not representative of reality.
A good algorithm will absolutely represent reality, otherwise you would notice that it's not working. It may not reflect the actual reality behind the black hole, but it would remove the whole, making it indistinguishable from what you would think should be behind the hole.
With claims of "the hole is part of the history" aside, it would make these photos much easier to look at, allowing one to focus on the content of the photo, rather than the hole.
> It may not reflect the actual reality behind the black hole
And therein lies the problem. I'd rather see literally nothing, a black hole, than some AI-constructed representation of what an algorithm determines 'should' be there.
A trade-off solution could be to turn the hole color from black to a gray that match the average tone from the perimeter area surrounding it. The hole would be less noticeable at the first sight and would allow people to focus in the rest of the photo.
My impression was that that is precisely the whole point of this project: to draw attention to the gaping hole in the photos, to highlight the crass censorship which led to these photos being suppressed for years. The hole _is_ the focus of the photo, hence why the title is 'The black hole photographs', to highlight that these photos were chucked into a black hole.
Try reading the article. In this instance the editors were the censors, as they were government workers.
And regardless of whether or not you want to call it censorship or some obfuscated term like "editorial choices", the point remains that the black holes draw attention to these "editorial choices", which seems to very clearly be the point of this project. Removing them, or making them unobtrusive is counter to the aims of the project.
As others have pointed out in this comment section, there's good evidence that the editor just didn't like these photos, since nearly every one has a nearly identical photo, with better composition, that was "approved".
After verifying this with around 20 random photos, I now agree with that comment, and disagree with the article. The article doesn't seem to have merit.
> it would remove the whole, making it indistinguishable from what you would think should be behind the hole
There is no algorithm in existence or will ever be discovered in our lifetimes that could cover those black holes with enough accuracy, or creativity, to make it indistinguishable from the real thing.
The training data for such a neural network is extremely easy to generate. Combine it with a GAN, and Demis Hassabis will get it working in 5 years - if you can get him interested.
LaMa give you already pretty robust result.
https://github.com/saic-mdal/lama
Certainly neural networks capable enough to perform this task in our lifetime will be developed.
That will get you a "best guess", not necessarily what was actually captured. It'll be the same if you told a historian + artist to draw in the blanks.
> A good algorithm will absolutely represent reality, otherwise you would notice that it's not working. It may not reflect the actual reality behind the black hole
If you define "represent reality" as "lie in a convincing way", then maybe. But, it has zero with reality.
I don't think this is a good metric. For fun and entertainment, it works, but lots of contexts need more than that. Take an example of lossy audio, like MP3. People are generally fine with 128k mp3s, but I doubt audio engineers would want to store masters in that format and bitrate.
In case of colorization, the issue is that the color really is lost on the film. Multiple shades of different colors map to the same shade of grey on black and white media - my favorite example is that B&W TV make-up was bright green. So them no matter what you do, it'll be just a conjecture of what the original color might have been.
We don't know (and in a sense can't know, unless we have separate first hand records) what was behind the black spots. Cigarettes? Disfigurement? Nudity? Famous people's faces?
Yes, the implication that it was censorship or a cover up is unwarranted. It's still sad that the censor felt it was necessary to completely ruin the photos in order to mark them as "not fit for purpose", why simply not use them? He didn't burn them up, so they still take up space, he just decided to permanently damage them.
Some of the photos are obviously flawed or uninteresting, but others look good and even touching. Why ruin them?
He was working off of negatives, so he marked the negatives he didn't want to publish. The negatives come as a long strip, so you can't just remove the bad ones.
Presumably if there was an entire strip of bad ones, it would be tossed, but most of the time it was a mix, and it was a way to mark them.
Not a great way, since someone else might like the photo, but I guess he saw zero value in the poor photos (basically the same as pressing delete on a digital camera - do you keep every photo you take, even bad ones?)
Don't forget - he wasn't working off of "historical" photos, to him, these were present day photos, and easily replaceable.
To us these are irreplaceable parts of history, but it wasn't like that to him.
> It's still sad that the censor
Editor, not censor - he was preparing interesting photos for publication.
> do you keep every photo you take, even bad ones?
Unfortunately yes. This is the problem with digital photos, at least on a phone: the effort to remove the bad ones is not worth it for someone like me who takes pictures occasionally and never looked at them anyway (this is why I do not take a lot either)
I wonder if people who are not into photography actually manage their photos (sort, tag, prune)?
I have thousands of photos from 2005 to ~2014, lousily sorted by the year and some events, stored on a USB HDD.
The last year I took a camera again, with a mobile photo too. After a couple of hundreds of shots and a futile attempt to manage them I understood what while some photos could be of interest for me a couple decades later, if I don't have a strong desire to save some exact shots now - I just wipe them all.
Of course I found myself wanting to show a couple of photos half a year after I wiped them, but the value was in showing them to a person I unexpectedly met again, not in the photos themselves.
I still don't touch my old library. "Some other day".
Though if I manage to organize and merge my two NextCloud instances I would probably upload some of the photos to it for the safekeeping.
> basically the same as pressing delete on a digital camera - do you keep every photo you take, even bad ones?
I used to keep everything, now I make an effort to delete the crap or even redundant photos. I agonize over this, but I try to do it. Then again, most photos I take I never look at again in my life, which I'm guessing happens to many of us in the age of digital cameras.
> To us these are irreplaceable parts of history, but it wasn't like that to him.
Yes, this is the crux of the problem.
Like you, I don't think this was censorship. I used the word "censor" because that's how the article frames it, but I agree this was an act of editing/choosing, not censorship.
Many spots are centered and at a similar distance from the margin. The majority of hole positions would be random respect to the content, and much more directly linked with the paper puncher size and shape.
Thats not very hard to restore, but what text are you going to put in? unless you're careful its going to be misleading.
which kinda leads to the greater point, when you "restore" something, colourise or up-res, you end up putting in anachronisms, something that should be there. Perhaps its better to have these photos in context, rather than "healed" with misleading data.
Won't putting in some random cat's face be worse? Meanwhile the hole in the last picture seems to be just over some part of the building, the hole takes away a part of the building's number, but a sign above it says "1233". I suppose there could've been another signage (like the one between the building number and the "Wines & Liquors" sign).
https://cleanup.pictures/ (not affiliated) worked really well on a number of them - especially those where the hole is simply an area of sky or grass. For many I can't tell where the hole was, despite it being almost a one-click solution.
Forgive me if this sounds insensitive but I’m curious for some feedback:
Were people uglier back then? Is it my own biases based on clothing and hair style? Is it because of the type of film? Better dental today? More opportunity to adjust one’s appearance with disposable income today?
But most curiously: does anyone else have this passing thought when looking at older photos? Or am I just betraying my own shallow vanity?
Country people were farmers or farm workers. Farm prosperity varies a lot, but always involved back breaking physical work, the type of work that breaks your body. The poorer the farmer, the harder the work. They also had big families that were hard to feed, and at best had occasional access to a doctor in private practice who had a limited array of tools.
My grandparents families were farmers back in Ireland, born just after the First World War. My maternal grandfather was the 4th oldest son, and my grandmother the 9th child and 3rd daughter. They were fortunate in that their family owned (and still owns) the farm, but unfortunate in that they had no job prospects of any kind at home. Literally.
In spite of relative prosperity, they didn’t have running water and parts of the houses had dirt floors at the time. My grandfather had a great story about seeing an electric light for the first time — in 1925/6 in a pub where a salesman was demonstrating a battery lamp.
These fold were poor, often worked for most daylight hours, wore homespun clothing often, had no electric light, makeup, etc. The men often died young and the women had 2-3 times more children than today. Glamour was not an everyday consideration!
I honestly don't understand how you can see ugly people in enough of those photos to consider remarking on it. I mean, some are homely and some are regular looking, but others are quite good looking. I see plenty of ugly young people in photos today.
This isn't a feel good or a "good old days" kind of comment. I honestly see beautiful people in many of those photos.
I had a related thought as the commenter above. I was just struck by how the hardness of those years clearly was visible on most of those folk. It clearly detracted from their physical appearance. Beauty != their value and uniqueness as people.
I totally understand that and I'm not conflating both. I truly mean that many of the people in these photos look good to me. Not "beauty inside", but actual physical beauty.
Obviously not all of them, but enough that a remark about people being uglier back then seems out of place to me.
If you look at the war documentary "They shall not grow old" you may come to the same conclusion. A good portion of people in that era were malnourished. If I recall correctly, the documentary mentions the army had to do a fair bit to get recruits into shape (by feeding them well and putting them through training).
Lack of dental and fluoridated water may be another factor. I suspect back then it was also more common to smoke.
The National School Lunch program was signed into law by Truman in 1946. Its purpose was stated as to "safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation’s children"
> Additionally, because this occurred in a post-war Congress, another argument to make funds permanent came from the fact that men were rejected from Selective Service during the war because of poor nutrition when they were children.
This is an excellent documentary. Thoroughly recommend it if you have even a passing interest in WW1, though it's heart-breaking. Produced and directed by Peter Jackson: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7905466/
It's also a technical tour de force, they turned shaky black and white footage with variable frame rate (from early hand cranked video cameras) into almost-cinema-grade color footage, and they recreated the sound using speakers local to the areas of the soldiers, combined with lip reading. It's an incredible work.
To me, kids and younger adults look fine, put them in current fashions and they'd pass today without comment. It's the middle-aged and older ones whose faces are really ravaged by time and experience. And the teeth, oh lordy.
You have to be pretty wealthy to afford to snowboard (good nutrition, good healthcare, etc.). Then, if you get to the upper echelons of the sport you're looking at getting advertising deals, and so, looking like someone advertiser's want to use images of is probably really helpful.
Going by James Nestor’s observations and research in his book ‘Breath’: he relays that a Victorian dentist notes “the better the school, the worse the teeth”. Teeth straightness and overcrowding are ‘upper-class’ issues. Poorer people, in the authors claims, are exposed to tougher food. The increased chewing they do actually causes the palate to grow correctly and without crowding. Soft food does the opposite.
I've heard this before, but it isn't really true any more. We all eat soft, processed foods now with little differences between classes. Although we also have much more advanced dentistry, so it isn't necessarily very obvious either
That is definitely not true now as poor people get the overcrowding as well, not to mention that I'm too lazy to see if this class line is actually true.
But more to the point, this person would have been biased. Like today, poor people had some trouble affording the dentist. They would have seen more rich than poor in other words. Like today, good teeth would have been a sign you were wealthy - depending on which country you live in (For example, Brazil has an excellent national dentistry program, and folks tend to go to the dentist regularly as it is cheap-to-free)
Even later for poor/lower class people - my mom was born in the early 1950s and she didn't start brushing her teeth until her teens. I used to think losing all your teeth was a natural part of aging.
It is natural. I brush/floss assiduously and am looking at losing them all. People older than me usually have a mouth full of crowns, implants and dentures.
It's not natural, adult teeth do not spontaneously die off and fall out; adults only lose their teeth because of disease or trauma. When I was a kid I thought it was exactly the same as losing your baby teeth. Greying is natural, tooth loss is not.
My grandparents (all 4) had lost all their teeth by their late 40s-early 50s. It was due to never brushing their teeth (they never owned a toothbrush!) plus smoking - not age. I currently have plenty of friends and acquaintances in the late 40s-early 50 age range and not a single one has a full set of dentures like all my grandparents did.
>In 1960, about 49 percent of adults aged 65-74 had lost all of their teeth. In 2012, about 13 percent of this age bracket was in the same predicament.
If tooth loss was just a normal part of aging there would be no way to make such drastic improvements.
My husband also brushes and flosses everyday and regularly has tooth issues. I know exactly why though - It's entirely due to poor toothbrushing technique.
There's also a lot of variation between teeth. Smooth teeth are less likely to develop caries than teeth with deep crevices, and some people have brittle teeth that break easily.
It's not just how well you brush your teeth.
Another factor is what you eat/drink. If you drink sweetened drinks all day, your teeth are probably going to suffer, and I doubt that brushing teeth twice a day is going to make up for it.
Funny my thought was I didn’t see very many obese people, and that if the people in these photos were looking at photos of modern society they would probably wonder why so many people are overweight.
I know it was the depression, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s not the reason (I don’t imagine any of them were obese prior to the depression).
Anyway, your point could be just a bias…I’d say spend some time scrolling through something like “people of Walmart” photos and see if you change your mind.
I was just about to comment on exactly this. The number / fraction of obese people in these photos is tiny compared to the people you see in modern US life now.
In addition to the reasons provided, I'd posit two additional contributing factors:
An absence of readily accessible - nay oppressively omnipresent - pop-culture & advertising, pushing infeasibly perfect images, and
A relative scarcity of mirrors. Yes, 'proper' mirrors had been invented a hundred years before this era, but even by the early 20th century they'd still have been a luxury item, especially for people in this kind of pervasive poverty.
Another thing that was lacking back then is digital cameras, or even affordable chemical film. At the time, photography was a lot more expensive, and you probably only got one shot of a person.
Today, we can get a preview on a digital camera's screen and we can take as many photos as we want, and then edit them afterwards. That just leads to better looking photos being presented.
Point and shoot cameras such as the Kodak Brownie were pretty affordable back then. When released in 1900 the Brownie cost 1$, which would be about 35$ in today's money.
It's an indicator of the level of health and wealth in modern society. If you are able to read and reply to this thread, then you live in a country/culture where your wealth is orders of magnitude greater than those shown in the photos.
- the culture of modesty affected both men's and women's dress and grooming habits, women somewhat more, but men also quite significantly
- stylistic haircuts were not available in rural settings without professional barbers/hairdressers
- clothes were not as stretchy; cotton and wool were coarser, nylon more rigid, polyester and spandex nonexistent
- the economics of the time favored thicker, more durable fabrics over thin, friable, wears-a-hole-after-one-year fast fashion fluff
- sun exposure, particularly among white people in the United States (which is much sunnier than Europe), was rarely avoided or mitigated, particularly among the working class
- childhood nutrition was worse, particularly among the lower classes in the period between the first wave of enclosure/monoculture/industrialization of agriculture and the dawn of nutrition science (hence fortification)
- these are images that the government did not want to show people, of course there's a higher prevalence of unattractive people!
> sun exposure, particularly among white people in the United States (which is much sunnier than Europe), was rarely avoided or mitigated, particularly among the working class
Sure farmers in the 1930s had more sun exposure than your average office worker does today. But it was certainly not rare to avoid or mitigate sun exposure. Look at the pictures. Notice the bonnets, hats, and long sleeves that the people working outside are wearing.
My great grandmother (working class, born in 1912) always wore long sleeves, long pants, and a hat to do work outside. Even in the middle of July in Georgia. This was normal.
> these are images that the government did not want to show people, of course there's a higher prevalence of unattractive people!
Read some of the comments above by ars. That’s not actually what happened. Almost every picture has another slightly different version that was published.
These weren’t censored, it was just an editor editing.
I didn't notice a huge difference, but your comment reminded me of something my grandma said in her later years (she died around 2018 and was well into her 90s, so she grew up in the 30s). "All the young people these days are so gosh darned good looking" as if it blew her away, lol. So maybe there's something to that, I don't know.
I think in the same way then as now, media is selective in amplifying certain ideas of human asthetics. There are millions of similarly poor, hard-working people now who don't spend a lot of time tweaking their image. These people are not in your Insta feed either.
(But I think this specific set of photographs sought out a more unbiased view of whomever was working in these areas, and I can see why people were and are furious about the casual destruction of these records!)
To me, the people in these pictures look absolutely normal and natural, unlike the ridiculously "enhanced" (often by the camera itself) photos which are far more common today.
More opportunity to adjust one’s appearance with disposable income today?
These are from The Depression, so there'd certainly not be much in the way of wearing cosmetics. Frankly, I think the modern trend of making people's skin almost plastic-like in appearance looks very weird and unnatural.
I applaud you for at least being introspective and considered when asking this question, even if I didn't necessarily feel the same while looking at them. Some of the folks replying to you would be better served to approaching their responses similarly.
Money helps you look better in a lot of ways. A few of those pics show the impact of dental health alone, but also persistent hunger and stress clearly wear/break down aspects of beauty.
People smiled less in the 1930s. Smiling has increased with media exposure over time.
To me, the people actually look healthier. Few extreme overbites or underbites. Decent posture, strong chins, few bellies sticking out (indicating metabolic syndrome).
Edit: and sure, missing teeth. And not worrying about media, people with the missing teeth don't seem ashamed of them.
It may not be far off from the truth. It's been argued that, not that people smiled less overall back then, but that in earlier times, photograph etiquette was in line with painting etiquette. You were expected to make a serious face preserved for posterity. It's only over time as photos become more spontaneous and ubiquitous that we have adopted the cultural vocabulary of smiling in response to having our picture taken, or so the argument goes.
Fucking idiot punching holes in photos so unnecessary, good thing we have machine learning to fill in the holes with what we could expect to see in their place.
Which is utter nonsense. They were blackholed simply because he felt they weren't good photos. Plenty of very similar photos were published.
There was zero "message control" here.
Here is a direct link to the photos: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=%22hole+punch%22&co=f... without the false conspiracy theory commentary.
If you browse the photos you'll see most are simply poor, or duplicate photos, and if you click through you'll find links to similar photos that were published.
@dang if you see this, could you change the url to the loc.gov link and the title to "The Black Hole Photographs: Unpublished Images from America’s Great Depression"