The Photographer Who Set Out to Watch Herself Age | Hacker News Reader

The Photographer Who Set Out to Watch Herself Age

newyorker.com

51 pointsfortran7723 comments

My favorite picture is [1] because the caption for it is "Floyd with her husband and a old electronic device," because I guess you can't use the letters "VCR" in an article anymore because no one will know what you mean.

Looks like there's a Coleco Adam[2] in the picture too, a television set, cable box, a printer, and a fan.

[1] - https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5fd116c330adc13fe89fb4f2/...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleco_Adam

Story from a 50 year old friend of mine:

On introducing him to a bunch of new engineers on the project: "This is Bob. He's older than TV."

Bob: "I'm not older than TV. But I am older than VCRs."

Young engineers: "What's a VCR?"

Where do you see that caption? The pictures are captioned only with dates on the page. That one is captioned "July 17, 1985".

In any case, maybe the "old electronic device" is a reference to the Coleco? It looks like it's being used for word processing, which at the time was pretty novel.

I'm seeing it in emacs-w3m. It's probably the alternative text caption for when you can't see images directly, like for screen readers.

Oh, yep. I forgot I have a "show alt text" bookmarklet I can use on iOS:

    javascript:function%20b(e,c)%7bfor(var%20i=0;i%3Cc;i++)%7be.parentNode.insertBefore(document.createElement('br'),e.nextSibling)%7d%7dfunction%20s()%7bvar%20t=this.title%7C%7Cthis.alt%7C%7C'No%20Text';alert(t)%7dfor(var%20i%20in%20document.images)%7bvar%20e=document.images%5bi%5d;var%20t=e.title%7C%7Ce.alt;if(t)%7bb(e,2);e.parentNode.insertBefore(document.createTextNode(t),e.nextSibling);b(e,2)%7de.onclick=s%7d

I ways wonder. It seems like a lot of looking old is how we present ourselves. At some point she got an an old lady haircut and glasses. But her skin still looked fairly youthful.

People seem to choose what age they want to identify with I guess.

Maybe.

When I became a dad I tried to put myself into my child's brain and imagine what sort of dad they might want when we were in public — say having a continental breakfast in a hotel.

I decided a sandal-wearing and nerdy t-shirt dad would not be the one I would want in public. So I started dressing a little more "smartly".

Further, when you see the older person in the fashion of someone 3 decades their junior ... at some point I think we decide we don't want to be that person.

I love Noah Kalina. He also has an amusing newsletter filled with wacky and random anecdotes about life in rural NY. About the only subscribed email I look forward to receiving.

Somewhat related, Nicholas Nixon has photographed four sisters for over forty years. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/03/magazine/01-b...

There's also the Up film series which concluded last year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_(film_series)

Thanks for this - something hugely moving about it

Wow. Fearless, unblinking. Taking the pictures was the easy part - publishing them took courage.

I've always wondered if hollywood looks at photo sets like this. It could take old photos of actor1 and cast accurate actors/actresses for "young actor1 for flashback" or "sister of actor1".

I don't think accuracy is a goal; they want young actor1 to look similar to how old actor1 looks now (but young), not to look similar to how old actor1 looked when he was young.

That's an interesting subtlety.

I also found it interesting what they did for one of the spiderman movies. When he was young and skinny he looked weak, but later as spiderman he looked muscular. The trick was they modified the regular spiderman to look skinnier, where you would initially think they would do it the other way.

I think there's a tangent here for wardrobe and set design too.

They probably don't want it to look accurate, but either to look like what we felt it looked like then through nostalgia, or how we wish it looked like then, depending on what type of media you're making. You always want a lens over what you're showing, in the feel of what you're making.

Not sure about that, but they are using them to "digitally" portray significantly younger versions of actors.

As a keen photographer myself and someone who's done similar projects [albeit not on such a timescale] I've got to 'say I found that body of work pretty underwhelming. Look through any family album and you'll find similarly uninteresting content. I really don't see what all the fuss is about. But I guess, if you call something "Art" people often invest it with more significance than it merits.

Inadvertently people are doing this kind of thing all the time now. In 60 years we’ll be able to see people’s photos as they age from young to old.

After having acquired a few years back family photos going back 100+ years, I can say it is already happening to me.

I scanned and digitally retouched every one of the photos over the span of several years — making myself the sort of self-appointed archivist for the family photo album.

It gave me plenty of time to look at the people in the photos: relatives all of them but many having died before I was born. In time I was able to recognize them from photo to photo, watch them age, watch the fashions change (as well as consumer camera technology).

Entire lives are laid out in the photos: childhood, adulthood, marriage, children of their own, old age, finally a headstone in a small field in Missouri....

There is a somber but touching "cycle of life" on display that can make you try more often to "seize the moment" or at least reflect on your existing in it.

Or we'll have a deep learning tool that can show us what we will look like.

https://archive.is/Me9F9

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