A Cat Meme Photographer from a Century Ago | Hacker News Reader

A Cat Meme Photographer from a Century Ago

saturdayeveningpost.com

122 pointsainar-g53 comments

I don’t think they qualify as memes to be honest. For a lot of people “meme” is synonymous with just “funny picture” it seems, but a real meme is something more than just a funny picture.

I think Wikipedia puts it quite well:

> An internet meme, commonly known as just a meme, is an activity, concept, catchphrase, or piece of media that spreads, often as mimicry or for humorous purposes, from person to person via the Internet.

The spreading from person to person being the crucial part.

> The spreading from person to person being the crucial part.

People mailed them to each other.

Well, there was no internet a hundred years ago. Nor photocopiers. But I'll bet these spread like wildfire from person to person back then, limited only by how willing the original viewer was to risk losing their copy to a family member or friend. And back then, family members and friends spent a lot more time together in close physical proximity.

And now that they've been digitized, you can guarantee that at least one of us here is going to do our part to fulfill the original and best purpose of the internet, which is to share funny pictures of cats. These are extraordinary specimens!

Both the word and the concept has become a meme. Nitpicking its "real" meaning is misunderstanding the meme.

> a real meme is something more than just a funny picture.

> The spreading from person to person being the crucial part.

The article says:

"They were called postcards, or souvenir cards, and mailing them to friends and relatives was immensely popular for sharing a gilded, snowy holiday scene or even a lolcat."

I was being overly simplistic.

I still think there is a difference between individually forwarding a funny picture to others, and what a meme is.

In order to be a meme, I should have said that it needs to be adopted and adapted by a collective of people.

A postcard sent by me to my friends with a cute cat is not a meme. An image macro that I make and share to a collective group of my friends and them making variations of it makes the image a meme.

>A postcard sent by me to my friends with a cute cat is not a meme.

And when they send it to others, who send it to others, then it is a meme.

I think only if some of them make modifications or variations on it.

Or, at least, that should be required to make it a central example of the concept?

is this a meme? http://qr.ae/TUGRIY

Yeah,

(Or perhaps an instance of one or more memes? But that would probably a definition and inconvenient to say, so I will say yes,)

that image is a meme.

>They were called postcards, or souvenir cards

Wait! People nowadays don’t know what a postcard is?

> I don’t think they qualify as memes to be honest. For a lot of people “meme” is synonymous with just “funny picture” it seems, but a real meme is something more than just a funny picture.

Agreed.

> it needs to be adopted and adapted by

I don't think you get to target your pedantism quite so tightly.

A meme before about 2005 was "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture" (m-w.com).

The "image macro" meaning (meme-ing?) with adaptation is a very recent interpretation (lolcats and icanhazcheezburger?), and as you said above, "a lot of people" don't necessarily even think of "meme" that way.

A “meme” before 2005 was a made-up word that only Richard Dawkins and a few other people ever used (a way of extending his discussion of self-replication in evolutionary biology to cultural phenomena), and many other people thought was a rather pointless synonym for “idea” or “concept” built on a flimsy analogy.

Then people on the web decided they needed a word for “popular funny picture with lots of remixes”, and adopted that word (maybe as a joke?).

I discovered the word "meme" on Usenet discussion groups back in 1992. It was a well-known idea in the Hacker News of that day, and was being applied to things that were being passed around on the Internet. However, since this was before the web had caught on, the memes were all textual. I was not surprised then when I saw the term used in its present, graphical meaning.

The Selfish Gene came out in the mid 1970s and was a big bestseller (probably in the millions of copies sold by now). Sure, a few other people adopted the term, but it was not in wide use. I would guess most of the people who talked about “memes” in the 90s had directly read Dawkins’s book.

I discussed memes in the 90s, but have never read Dawkin's book.

I probably got it from study of artificial intelligence/machine learning/evolutionary algorithms - I had no indication most of the others in my discussions had read The Selfish Gene either.

As someone who has made a lot of humorous memes professionally for brands, I agree that these aren't memes but are cute, funny pictures.

Isn't that marketing?

Memes seem to have a culture jamming aspect to them. I don't think brands would sit well with that.

It is marketing indeed, but brands want to believe they’re doing genuine memes when they’re really doing just spam.

Image macros are just called memes now. I don't like it either, but language evolves in ways we don't necessarily like and there's not a lot to be done about it.

"he committed suicide after receiving a cancer diagnosis"

Wow, he sure came to a sad end to his life after spending so much of it making such whimsical images. I guess the stress of looking after his parents had ground him down a lot over the years.

Nice pictures though.

I mean, he was 73 at the time. Having lived a long life, making a small but noticeable difference in the world, I think he had the full right to say "Ah, screw it, I'm done." after receiving the diagnosis.

Cancer was pretty much a death sentence back then. I would have made the same call.

Doesn't look like those cats were having a good time

True. But at least they were still alive.

The thought that they might be stuffed crossed my mind

Yup, there's a stuffed frog collection in my town, made in the early 20th century. Really bizarre and disgusting. If you have the stomach for it google “Ferenc Mere”.

The original Pepe meme?

They seem pretty content to me -- no snarling or hissing, no hair standing on end. I'll bet he was nice to the kitties and they didn't mind.

or alive at all :)

If you look at their fur patterns, you can see that the same cats are used in different pictures. There is subtle differences in the same cats facials frowns that wouldn't be there if it was dead.

I was joking, but they might be in fact highly sedated.

Yeah that might be. On some of the pictures it looks like the cats are focused on the same thing off behind the camera. Some cats can be really mellow. Maybe they were trained to stay still for a delicious treat? One can hope.

I remember an article about modern animal photographers that uses fishing line to bind dead or live animals in surprising positions. The things people do for money.

I thought so too, especially while they were being put into those costumes. Who would have thought that Photoshop would contribute (a tiny bit) to reduce animal suffering? :)

This was my first thought. I was strongly suspecting at least some use of taxidermy, especially for the paws. However, the photographer apparently had other means:

> Frees admitted to using very stiff clothing as well as needles and forks to hold his subjects in place.

So he claimed that they weren't hurt, but they certainly were forced into those positions. I'm going to go with no, they weren't having a good time. Given the time, though, it could have been worse.

Interesting. My first impression was that only the heads were real (looking through some kind of curtain) and that the paws were stuffed.

Buried a few miles away from my rotten workplace https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/24091730/harry-whittier-...

Do you live in SRQ?

Yeah but I work in Pinellas Co

How is that commute?

Soul crushing, dangerous, unsustainable

> ”He makes exposures at 1/5th of a second, has to junk two-thirds of his negatives,”

That’s quite impressive especially given the subjects and shutter speed; if I get 1/3 of negatives I’m happy with on a 120 roll, it’s a very good day indeed.

In his case, motion blur given live subjects would be a common problem, resulting in trashing two-thirds of the photos. With a modern camera and sensitive file or sensors, you can shoot at much faster shutter speeds for the same amount of light. On a given shoot, I may take 250-500 shots of which, unless I screw up, almost all are technically fine (correct exposure and focus) but only a handful turn out to be keepers for aesthetic reasons. But then, I shoot mostly landscapes which tend not to move around too much.

"120 roll" refers to an early 20th century camera technology. I've never worked with anything near that old but I had the same thought, getting 33% keepers under the circumstances is pretty amazing.

>claimed the cats were alive

Yeah I dunno about that. Those legs look pretty bent out of shape...

I think the only part of the cat that is really the cat is the head. All the pictures have a darker flat background.

I assume the scene is setup and there is a hole in the background for the cat to stick it's head through. The photographer can get the cats to look somewhere and take the picture. It's also possible some of the paws are real but I also feel they don't quite look right.

“He never married”

It’s rare to that euphemism used in modern writing. I’m guessing the author might have just read it in research and copied it.

How is that a euphemism?

It's a very classic way to say "he's queer" before it was at all socially acceptable to talk about it.

Interesting! How would one say that... he never married?

Straight and never married? IDK, ladies man, or committed to his work, or never settled down?

It would be arguing the “social” he never married vs the literal. It’s been reasonable acceptable to say gay since I was a kid so I only know about the phase from reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_never_married

But I suppose the author meant that "he never married" in the literal sense.

Maybe these count as memes, and maybe they don't...

... but they are now! I'm definitely making image macros out of these things!

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