I suppose this could also work as a Carspotters' Challenge, but I also thought it would be interesting as an exercise in historical reconstruction. We begin with this photo of a 1950s car show:
This photo was taken on Saturday, May 15, 1954 in a Thrifty Drug Store parking lot at the corner of Rodeo Rd. and Rancho La Brea in Los Angeles. Nice collection of cars, no? Well, there's something wrong with it. Have a guess before clicking below the fold.
This is not, in fact, the original photo. This is:
The original photo was colorized by Rik Hoving in 2006 and the story of the show and the photo can be found here. Unfortunately, there's precious little about the photo and the colorization process (how did he choose the colors and such), but it highlights what can be done with digital image manipulation these days (actually those days, I guess) and how it affects our perceptions of the past. People are very visual creatures so we tend to key on images to create lasting impressions of events. Black and white photography and motion pictures have their appeal, but we -- at least I -- can tend towards thinking of the past as being what see in images: that the past was largely colorless and drab. But such was not really the case. Colors were often bright and, to our eyes, gaudy.
For example, the Greek statues that we today think of as beautifully elegant and simple in their clean, white marble were brilliantly painted:
In this case, we have a good idea of the color scheme because small bits of the original paint remain (source). You can also get an idea of what colorful creations Egyptian temples were at this link.
FWIW, I don't mind colorization, within some limits. With the statuary, for example, we have a really good idea what the original colors were so viewing the reconstruction is a pretty accurate rendering what what it actually looked like in antiquity. In other cases, well, it can be misleading. I'm guessing Mr. Hoving used typical automobile colors for the time so we can be fairly confident it's at least in the ballpark with reality. Then again, we tend to get these visual images set in our minds as representing reality even though we know intellectually that many times the colors are educated guesses. If you're a certain age, you probably imagine that Cleopatra looked remarkably like Elizabeth Taylor when in reality we have a very dim idea of what she really looked like.
And just to keep this a little on track for this Christmas week, I shall leave you with another example of how images often drive what we think of as reality. Take a quick guess at who this is:
This image, making the rounds last week among the various news media, is one researcher's recreation -- based on various features of contemporary Middle Eastern skeletal material -- of what Jesus probably really looked like. This isn't exactly a new idea, I saw much the same thing a few years ago on one of those What Was The Real Jesus Like TV shows. I'm guessing it's probably in the ballpark as well, although if you put that image up next to the usual one, I would bet that the vast majority of people would recognize the traditional one as representing Jesus. The usual image of Jesus developed over long centuries with artists depicting Jesus with a number of motivations, most with a bias towards "drawing what they know", with Europeans making Him look European, sub-Saharan Africans making him African, and so forth.
Hence, feel free to discuss the colorization process, 1950s automotive colors, and whatever else catches your fancy during this (probably) low-click week.
By the way, I came across this image originally via this link to a number of "fake" images; I use the quotes because some are not technically "fake" but sometimes misinterpreted. Enjoy the post and enjoy the week!
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