Student photographs people with hidden spy cam in the 1890s (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Student photographs people with hidden spy cam in the 1890s (2018)

boredpanda.com

566 pointsjakobdabo203 comments

Great find. Thanks for posting.

I love it when photos from this era occasionally emerge showing people acting naturally. We're so used to seeing the vast majority of Victorian photographs showing dour-faced people sitting or standing stiffly to attention, that it's sometimes difficult to believe they had human emotions, just like us.

It’s great. I also love video footage from that era as well, capturing the ordinary bustle of the streets. It’s fun when it’s local and you can point to familiar places. One of my favourites is Victoria and Vancouver BC around 1900[0].

[0] https://youtu.be/Jp1qWV5OZec

Here’s one from 1895, upscaled to 4k60 and colourized: https://youtu.be/EqbOhqXHL7E

The original seems to no longer be on YouTube; do you have a copy of a non-AI-hallucinated version?

Much better ones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ1OgQL9_Cw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo_eZuOTBNc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQs5VxNPhzk

I really hate these types of videos that ruin a perfectly good video and fill it with AI-generated fake frames and colors. Colorization especially is not something that an AI can do well yet. It generally turns it into a rainbowy mess of constantly shifting colors.

Also even the framerate is often wrong as these old movies didn't have consistent framerates. They were hand cranked so the framerate varied quite a bit.

These are horrible.

Would be fun to film the same route today, and show them side by side.

Here's a landmark:

https://www.google.com/maps/@48.425502,-123.3676965,3a,21.3y...

https://youtu.be/Jp1qWV5OZec?t=94

There's a side-by-side video of the Wuppertal "flying train" from 1902 and 2015 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7TqqdOcX4dc

Every single tree lining that road in 1902 gone and not replaced by 2015.

By three cars each X-D

But there is green lining added to the river at least. That river looked very sad in 1902.

In fact that's the only interesting photos from old albums (that and people you know). A 100,000th photo from the Eiffel tower will be the least interesting thing you will find (unless it happens to be a landmark that disappeared). But life in the street of Paris in the 60s is really interesting and amusing to contrast to today.

Similarly, the most interesting part of old magazines is often the ads.

Given how quiet the roads and pavements are in the video and photos does anyone know why the streets were built so wide?

Delivery wagons might be drawn with a team of two or even four horses (or even bullocks). You'd want to be able to turn them around in such streets. Certainly that was the case for Australian country town main streets laid down in the 1800s

> added in sound for ambiance

The actual noise levels may have been higher. Regardless, I think the main reason is ventilation. With coal and wood heating streets were designed to act as valleys pushing air through. Also, I hard that old European cities were built with airflow in mind. Whole streets were uninterrupted with trees while some have them.

Also I heard an opinion that Wrocław is one of the most polluted cities because it got a lot of new buildings that break the airflow on main streets.

No lanes, no rules, no turn signals, pedestrians are walking everywhere, every transport had it own speed and size, etc. And lots of goo on the road.

During the 1800s there were four sets of building regulations (or rather, laws) for Christiania (the name of Oslo back then), which regulated everything from the width of the streets to how many floors buildings could be. In 1827 the minimum street width became 11.35m, then 12.60 in 1842, 15.75 in 1875 and 20m in 1899. (https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murbyen_(Oslo) has a good overview).

The background for the regulation was the switch from unregulated wood buildings to requiring mainly brick as building material - there were some major fires before using bricks became the law.

I live just around the corner from one of the photos - the building in that photo hasn't changed much since back then.

Without the posed stiffness, the major thing remaining that makes them look 19th century is that they're all drowning in cloth; lots of thick layers.

> the major thing remaining that makes them look 19th century is that they're all drowning in cloth; lots of thick layers.

Aren't they in Oslo?

Most of these looks like early summer photos though. Temperatures likely around 20C.

> early summer

That seems quite specific. How do you tell?

From what I see it's probably not winter (lack of snow), not autumn (lack of leaves on the ground). But that still leaves a pretty long time period with a bigger range of temperatures.

Summers are pretty short in that part of the world.

Depends on what you mean by 'short'. I think you're probably thinking of much further north in Norway. Summers in Oslo are usually from May or June to August. Sometimes there's 20+ C in March, sometimes it's 5 C in May. Night frost usually sets in around late October/early November, with snow usually arriving in November or December. Snow is usually gone by or during March.

Apparently the average temperature in 1890 was 1.3 C colder than it is now.

Source: Born and living in Oslo.

> May or June to August

Well, that's fairly short by U.S. standards, at least when counting 20+ C weather, which in many states is nearly 6 months of the year, with summer heat lasting well through September in many places.

Even places south of Norway, like Netherlands, still considered pretty far north for many in the world, have relatively 'short' summers as well.

Ah, in that case then we have short summers. To me, "short summers" is the month or so of mosquito hell between spring and fall that they have in the northernmost parts of Norway.

The vibrant leaves that you can see on trees in many of the pictures usually appear in mid-May and last until October, so that narrows it down in terms of temperature. Likely 15-25 C.

The photos are definitely taken at very different times: #23 has flowers in the grass that remind me of summer. #27 has bare trees that say winter or late fall/early spring (and the lack of leaves or snow on the ground snow and relatively light garments of the soldier(?) makes me think early spring). Same for #48 and #55. #44 has parasols, indicating summer.

The layers don't look that thick, just voluminous, and likely quite good at letting through airflow.

Suits are always too many layers

Makes sense given that central heating wasn't a thing yet.

Some of those are actually hilarious. Like peak 80s shoulder pad fashion, only even more extreme:

https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/s...

Well, the pictures were taken in the 90s, only a few years after the 80s.

Properly exposing the plate—or whatever—took several seconds, and it's way easier to look dour for five seconds than to hold a rictus grin.

Source: Among other things, I've sat for a tintype portrait before. https://twitter.com/aaronbrethorst/photo

no, this is myth as clearly proven by these photos, it took pretty much no time to expose film/plate already in 19th century

Photographic technology developed rapidly between the heyday of tintype (1870s'ish) and when these pictures were made (1890s). See my other reply for some readings to learn more about late 19th century photography.

(Also, photography was invented in the 19th century. I'm not sure why you make such sweeping claims about a whole century when exposures went from taking hours to fractions of a second over the course of it.)

Tintype is a different technology. By the 1890s, it would have been as obsolete as rotary landline phones are today.

I think the reason is different, because even I, as a kid in the early 1980s, was taken to a photo shop for "official shots", well dressed and told to behave. It was a bit unnatural, yes. People in staged shots are generally a little stiff.

Of course a tintype is a different technology from fast film or plates, or whatever this photographer was using.

However, you're incorrect about the lack of usage in the timeframe specified: "Tintypes enjoyed their widest use during the 1860s and 1870s, but lesser use of the medium persisted into the early 20th century" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintype

Besides, the GP comment referred to the era, to which I was responding.

Your explanation is not without merit, however: "One common explanation for the lack of smiles in old photos is that long exposure times — the time a camera needs to take a picture — made it important for the subject of a picture to stay as still as possible. That way, the picture wouldn't look blurry." — https://www.vox.com/2015/4/8/8365997/smile-old-photographs

What confuses me: These are good photos! Many are sharp, well lit. And they were made from a pocket camera of people who didn't specifically stand still for the photo.

Why on earth did they have people stand like grim statues for those staged photographs? I thought it was because exposure times were extreme with those early cameras but this kinda proves it wasn't? 1890s, those must be among the first photographs, ever.

The first photograph successfully fixed to a substrate was in the 1820s, and the commercially viable daguerreotype came in the 1830s, so photography had been around a while in the 1890s.

Certainly for a tintype the subjects needed to be well lit and the exposure was still long.

Perhaps this persisted as habit even after the development of colloidal photography?

Yeah, I am even now a little suspicious of the photos authenticity for this reason.

You will notice that most of the photopgraphs have been made in direct sunlight. So he could have used high aperture and short shutter time. Most likely it was a fixed-aperture and shutter setup, since he could hardly have adjusted anything while shooting covertly. Still, not all of the photos are sharp, some do have motion blur, and some have grain, perhaps from pushing during development (i.e. correcting slightly underexposed shots).

But the technical basis was definitely on top of the game at the time, under the given conditions.

If you flip this around a bit... why would people think to smile for photographs? They're not looking dour, they're just sitting for a photo with their natural faces. Their main points of reference were drawn or painted portraits that people also didn't smile for (partially due to the amount of time you'd need to pose).

Smiling for photographs is a social behavior that took time to catch on.

Some were stiff.

https://historyofyesterday.com/the-unsettling-victorian-trad...

I'm the family's unofficial archivist so I inherited a bunch of 8mm reels from the 1950s and most of the camcorder tapes.

This candid pictures remind me of those 1950s reels.

Since film cameras were new back then, almost everyone in the videos ignored the cameras and carried on with their normal activities. Just normal real life. Those videos are very natural.

As the decades pass, people start reacting to the video cameras differently. Videos from the 1980s and 1990s are full of "say hello to the camera scenes" when people unnaturally turn to the camera and say hello to it or make faces to it.

In the 2010s, cameras become smaller people start showing their best sides when the camera is nearby, like an automatic instagram pose style reflex.

> “When he was a young man at Oslo University he fell in love with a lady whom he did not know and with whom he was too bashful to become acquainted,” writes his biographer. “Wishing at least to have a picture of her, he decided that this was possible only by taking a photograph of her himself, without her knowing.”

Oh, technology.

So. Which one is she!

There's a pretty, young lady[1] that seems to appear in many of the photos! I was thinking exactly that this was the reason, a teenager in love mischievously taking hidden photos of his love interest, and then just rolling along with it and taking pics everywhere :D

[1] https://www.boredpanda.com/spy-camera-secret-street-photogra...

the OG Glassshole

It seems like back then people were smiling to a passerby and not to the camera. They'd keep a stern face when they were knowingly photographed.

Now we smile for the camera, but not so much to a stranger.

you read at least the title right, it's SPY cam, so obviously if someone is taking secret photo of you, you don't smile for camera and we don't know who are these people, if it's complete strangers or his acquintances, though some of the photos are clearly staged anyway

you could get same reaction even nowadays depending on country, obviously you wouldn't have much success in Eastern Europe, where (many) people consider smiling at stranger as sign of mental illness (at least if it's same gender)

> you read at least the title right, it's SPY cam, so obviously if someone is taking secret photo of you, you don't smile for camera and we don't know who are these people, if it's complete strangers or his acquintances, though some of the photos are clearly staged anyway

I think you misunderstood their point. In the past people who knew they were about to get photographed tended not to smile. Now people tend to smile.

TheSocialAndrew perceives that people now tend not to smile at strangers where as these candid photos show people a hundred years ago smiling at strangers.

I disagree, back then people were smiling to strangers and not to camera, now people smile in both situations, he was greeting these people so obviously if he greeted them with smile people smiled back, I doubt you would have any different result nowadays from most likely good looking well dressed 19yo kid.

> I disagree

That's fine. I am not arguing one way or the other. My point is that it is easier to get a response if you focus on the main point of disagreement.

In this case, the disagreement is, 'Is it common nowadays to smile at strangers on the street in Oslo, Norway (Where the original pictures were taken)?'

TheSocialAndrew says no, Markoff says yes.

Edit: Maybe a better question would be, 'Where in the world is it currently common to smile at strangers?'

Somewhat unrelated question that I could probably Google, but I figured it's more interesting to hear your take.

Why do people on old pictures look like they're from a completely different era? They look like they're from the 1800s. Is it the camera, the clothing or did they actually look slightly different from us? Or perhaps it's just an illusion?

Realistically I wouldn't expect humans' appearance to change that much in 100 years?

Could be modern lenses, filters, and/or touchups (i.e. photoshop) that distort images in a (typically) flattering way and distort some people's perception of "normal" photographs, since it's all pretty ubiquitous. Cell phones apply all sorts of processing effects, starting with the lense.

For me it's usually more the quality of the film/print/color/etc. Most 70s pics have a certain color/tone/hue/saturation that says '70s'. 60s too. And so on. There may be easier determinations between 1920s and 1930s pics, perhaps, but not quickly to my eye.

What's interesting about these is that... they're candid. Most 1800s photos were people explicitly sitting for a photo. Not smiling. Sitting, posing, very grim. Many of these pics showed people being natural - smiling, chatting to each other, etc. Normal human stuff.

The disturbing thing for me is that I noticed that special atmosphere/patina in 70s photos when I was a teenager in the 90s, but now I can see something analogous in pictures from the 90s.

The same thing will exist for people in 2010/2030 because of computational photography filters/algos.

In 2050s they'll look at today's smart phone selfies and wonder why people liked these smooth skin auto glamour edited fakes so much. Then the androids will chuckle to themselves and move on.

They'll probably do societal studies to determine if it helped with mating, just like how we analyze those colorful birds dancing weirdly in the forest.

I think it will have much more to do with the lack of HDR of today's photos.

Generally it's a shame that real HDR photos (not merged exposures, but "Dolby Vision for photos") ain't the norm yet.

I didn't find them that radically different. I can see resemblances in my own family members. Their facial hair is far superior though.

Clothes and photo style.

If you've ever seen a colourised and touched-up photo from the early 20th century, the only giveaway is the clothes.

Aside from photo technology and clothes, there's hair and facial hair styles which make a big difference. Look at people from the 80s compared to now in color photographs for examples.

People aged differently "back then" too. If you look at people in their 20s from many decades ago, possibly particularly during war eras, peopled seemed to just age faster. Soldiers in photos look nothing like baby-face soldiers from the modern era (when I was enlisted).

I mean, look at George Lazenby in his role as James Bond; how old do you think he was?

He was 30 years old. He looks closer to his 50's if he were alive now. He was a heavy smoker and in Malboro adverts, possibly lots of tanning as well, etc. Lifestyle differences and experiences are a big factor.

I thought this too, until I saw the pictures in the TFA.

They literally look exactly the same as people from our times.

Now I look at "1800s pictures" on some search engine's images, and they look completely different.

I'm gonna guess it's a mix of: doctoring/"touching up," camera, lighting, and cognizant angling/positioning of the people in question.

The candid shots look like people I would see on the street. While the stereotypical "1800s pictures" look like something I'd find on Instagram: completely alien to reality.

TFA?

“The fucking article”

It's usually, "the fine article," but yours works, too.

Or alternatively “the featured article” is common

I see, thanks! :)

What a perfect example of https://xkcd.com/1053/

And the humility that it recommends.

Have a nice day!

No it's not usually "the fine article". That is just a euphemism.

TFA originates from RTFM, which stands for "read the fucking manual". And it is "fucking" and not "fine", because people would be frustrated by noobs not reading manuals.

It is always funny when people try to euphemism things to avoid obscene or scary ideas spoken out loud.

My pet peeve is a 'lottery factor', because even if a guy would win $$$m you still can at least try to talk to him. You can't talk to a bus factored person.

RTFM was always, "read the fucking manual." In my experience, this is the first time I have seen TFA as anything other than "the fine article." YMMV.

And you don't see the obvious link between people saying RTFM! because someone didn't read the manual, and people saying "RTFA" or "it's in TFA" because people are writing comments on an article when they clearly didn't read it?

These acronyms are born out of frustration and not cordial conversation. Again using "fine" instead of "fucking" is just a euphemism. It is not the original nor correct phrase, and it doesn't make sense for it to be anything other than "fucking".

While that's 100% correct as the origin of the acronym, it should be noted that using TFA doesn't necessarily imply any frustration or condescension. It may, but often or usually these days it really is just shorthand for "the article" and nothing more.

Yeah there's a number of people nowadays that will dress up in period dress, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Same with films set in those times, the wardrobe department does a great job and if they would record in period cameras you wouldn't be able to tell it's a 'modern' person.

Diet has changed drastically since the 1950s. Approaching 50% obesity means we are never going back.

I didn't even think of that, the average person in the US these days is a lot wider these days.

When I first stepped afoot in the US (Newark Airport) in 1999 I saw more grossly overweight people in the first half hour than I had in the last half year in Norway. Easily.

Coming from Oslo, Norway, going to a dev conference. Cultures were very, very different then.

I absolutely loved walking up and down the streets of Boston though, it was simply amazing. I'll always be a bit sad I couldn't organise a visa for going there; instead I ended up down under - not a bad plan B!

1890s?

It's a combination of

1) the technology used to take the image (or video!)

2) the fashion of the subjects - Fashion includes more than just cloths.

3) the overall aesthetics of the scenery around the human subjects.

May I offer a guess about you personally? From your question, I’m guessing that you’re fairly young, possibly under 30 years old. I’m only guessing this, because, as people age, they begin to see the similarities instead of the differences when looking at old photos of people. Younger people tend to react the way you do to these kinds of photos.

I suspect a large part of it is caused by facial expressions and how the people pose. Having your picture taken was very serious business, so no smiles were allowed. Show your most serious, regal pose.

If you look at the "Happiest man in China" photo, it doesn't look like an old photo - it looks like a modern photo of somebody dressed up in old time clothes. There is no hard evidence, but many people believe that the man just wasn't aware of how people were expected to pose for a picture.

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2017/09/story-behind...

Another older example of this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_LAUGHING_VIOLINIST...

Originally shutter speeds were very, very long (and that lasted decades for more budget equipment), so smiling was generally a bad idea as people couldn't hold their smiles for so long and would just be blurred weirdly.

That probably influenced how people thought photos should be posed for, even when shorter and more reasonable shutter speeds were the norm.

For my eye I think it's mostly the hair style. E.g. there are no women with long open hair. And men have fancy beards and mostly wear a hat.

One thing during that area is tooth health. Almost everyone had severe issues with their teeth. Rotten black teeth were not an uncommon thing back then. People were aware of that and avoided opening their mouth.

It's part clothing, and for men different facial hair, and for women far less/different makeup, and the fact that the picture is black and white and grainy has a bit of an effect too.

Also different attitudes and culture - it affects how they stand and walk, and even probably to a certain extent facial expressions are expressed more often than others.

IMO, when the face is very clear, it just looks like an ordinary person wearing fancy Victorian clothes.

It's only when the faces are small or blurry do they look old.

The last photo of the man being affectionate with his young daughter is surprising to me. All my life, I've thought that men born before 1950, like my father, just didn't do that sort of thing. And yet here is a man born a hundred years earlier doing just that.

I believe that people have been exactly like us for tens or hundreds of generations.

Far further back still in so many ways

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv6Tuq1Dkfk

That’s remarkable comment that really highlights for me how different everyone’s experience can be. My father was born in the early 40s and was apparently nothing like your father.

But those two photos are definitely the best for me.

A lot of our common conceptions of the past are flat out wrong. Often deliberate fabrications for political ends.

Why wouldn't fathers, in general, be affectionate? The Bible (to take a very old book) if full of fatherly affection. Take the story of Abraham and his son to be sacrificed. The story has always been shocking because the reader knows the son was so wanted and loved and empathizes.

Even the prejudice isn't universal. Italians don't have this conception of cold fathers 100 years ago.

Could it be a protestant thing? Possibly except the Norwegians in this set are themselves Protestants.

I would chalk up the image of a cold, distant father, to the generational shock of 31 years of slaughter in Europe (1914-1945). Some blame Bismarck and his quest to make perfect soldiers through universal education (and the export of the Prussian model).

But, really, the past is not as bad as it is depicted. Life was tougher, but there was love, laughter, loyalty, beauty, and friendship. I suspect more so than today.

I think politics are a big part, but I've been wondering a lot lately how much of this was leaded gasoline as well. Crime waves and angry parents could easily have been lead poisoning.

Don't attribute to toxins what can be attributed to malice.

I think that OP draws on his family experience where it was like that. People tend to normalize the experience of their family.

It is definitely culture. While Norway is Protestant it long been very progressive. It is the first country establishing government watchdog for protecting children’s rights. Britain is kind of infamous for strict child raising and because of the dominance of British in history they color our perception of the past.

I have several family members who lived in Britain for years back in the day. They all describe the treatment of children in ways what would horrify Norwegians.

I live in an immigrant area of Oslo with many Muslims. They are known to be more strict with children. But even they remark on how strict British is. My neighbor had her daughter on exchange in Britain and her daughter describe the host family as very strict. They are not used to that behavior from growing up in Norway.

> family members who lived in Britain for years back in the day. They all describe the treatment of children in ways what would horrify Norwegians

In which case, you *must* read Roald Dahl's autobiography 'Boy' (and the follow up, 'Going Solo'). He moved from Norway as a child into the English public school system, and a treatment that horrified his parents.

Incidentally, the biographies are aimed at children but very cleverly written to appeal to adults. For example, he describes a school teacher (in the 1920's) who would occasionally jump and twitch in class, making startled noises. The children found out he had something called "shell shock" and decided that this meant a shell must have exploded so close to him that he jumped so high he hadn't stopped jumping........ Interesting and funny to read as a child, but this works on another level when you read it as an adult.

Or Orwell’s essays on British education, or Pink Floyd’s “Brick in the Wall part 2”, or Supertramp’s “Logical song”

British grammar school is brutal.

That photo stuck with me too. Such tender care, chilling with his kid and the dog at a park. That one photo made me feel more connected to humans of that past more than other historic photos I've seen.

(EDIT) Oh man there's an even more adorable pic of them rolling around too! https://www.boredpanda.com/spy-camera-secret-street-photogra...

Post ww2 lots of parenting books said that you had to be super strict and harsh with your children, or else they would lose the next war with Russia or whoever because they would turn out soft.

It’s really fascinating, but losing millions of fathers in the war and then the post trauma strict parenting have had knock on effects we are still dealing with.

I bet that the trauma was even stronger in the USSR, which lost unfathomable numbers, and that maybe that generational trauma -- even moreso than communism -- resulted in the hawkish, militaristic, paranoid, confrontational, guns-before-butter standoff across the iron curtain throughout the cold war and which I think even lingers today.

I know people that come from the USSR... they universally fear war even today and think that's a realistic possibility in the near future. Most people living today have grandparents who can still recall the horrors of WWII... they lost a much larger share of their population to the war than all countries in the West (I think more USSR citizens died in the war than in all other countries combined). Nazis burning entire villages to kill off the local population (so the region could be settled by Germans later), they claim all villagers were locked up in the local church and then they set fire on it... people tried hiding in the forrests when they knew the army was coming and had to eat grass and leaves to survive.

They became really harsh people, and the population of most of Russia and current-day Belarus, Poland, Ukraine etc have a very characteristic attitude towards other people and countries that's completely contaminated by those memories.

Yup, exactly that. Polish literary Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz was an immigrant to the US around 1946-1950 period, and he noted that what struck him in the US was that an average American is probably 10x kinder and nicer person than an average Pole. To him, the Americans were almost like children, happy and innocent, unaffected by the horrors of this world that the Polish people were subjected to.

As Nietzche noted - what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and Poles (and Russians, Ukrainians, Belorusians) that survived the war and communism are pretty tough as a result - but at the cost of having a crushed sprit and, quite often, losing hope in humanity.

Nah, the ideologies of fatherhood change over time all the time. And even in 1950, many dads would show affection to their children. Even if they would see child caring is female thing, many would be kiss and show love to them.

Also, in small easter european democracies before communism, politician had to kiss kids and at least pretends he likes them. Otherwise people assumed he is bad person. They valued family a lot.

One has to keep in mind and that a lot of what people think about is he past is from Britain due to its dominance. Britain has long had a very strict form of child raising. That has been part of the culture.

In Norway, where this is from, one generally believed in milder treatment of both children and prisoners than British. Physical punishment got banned much earlier.

My mother who grew up in the 1950s Norway always describe her father as exceptionally kind. He would spend time in the basement making doll house and doll furniture for my mother and her sister.

He did not have much money but would get my mom oil paint so she could learn to paint.

If any of the boys in her street was mean to my mom or her sister, her dad would be there right on the spot.

>The last photo of the man being affectionate with his young daughter is surprising to me.

Not 100% sure either way, but that may also be his son. Young boys also wore dress-like clothing during those times.

near as i can tell, he used a stirn concealed vest camera.

http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Stirn_Concealed_Vest_Camera

round film plate. no cassette, just round emulsified glass. six-exposure 14cm or four-exposure 17cm depending on model. exposure is allegedly adjustable somehow, but i'm not sure of the mechanism. plate loads into an internal frame with masks, advanced by the center dial, not sure how masks align.

many more of his photos and some images of the camera and exposed plates here

https://www.exibartstreet.com/news/19th-century-street-photo...

It’s reported in the first sentence of the second paragraph if you read TFA.

dang changed the link since i posted this. i also came across the boredpanda site but chose one that had more photos of the camera.

NRK (Norwegian state broadcaster) published an article this summer with some more images [0], including of some public figures in Oslo at the time like Henrik Ibsen.

[0] https://www.nrk.no/kultur/xl/carl-stormer_-studenten-som-sni...

Everyone ought to click through to this one if nothing else for the images where they've overlaid the photos on present-day Oslo.

Can we not post boredpanda.com please? It's basically blogspam; anything on it will have been primarily posted elsewhere first.

Do you have an original source for this set of images? I'm curious to find the original authors or publisher.

The original photos are in the collection of Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology and can be viewed digitally at https://digitaltmuseum.no/search/?q=Carl%20St%C3%B8rmer&aq=t...

There are notes/photos on/of the camera in the previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16049954

Worth linking directly, there are over 150 photos at the old link: https://www.boredpanda.com/spy-camera-secret-street-photogra...

Ok, we've switched to that from https://mymodernmet.com/carl-stormer-hidden-camera-photograp... above. Thanks!

This is the first time I've felt like the people in old photos aren't aliens.

The change in "hat culture" is pretty incredible though. That's a LOT of hats!

As a balding man with a round head I wish hats other than Baseball caps were acceptable.

As nothing in particular I wish braces were acceptable! They make so much more sense than tightening a belt laterally to defy gravity by friction.

If you want to wear them, wear them! You'll get odd looks much less than you think.

Huh, I didn't know that suspenders were called braces in England/Australia. I thought you meant dental braces, and was pretty confused at first.

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

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

> I didn't know that suspenders were called braces in England/Australia.

This has been the source of some comic misunderstandings, whereby an American bloke says they are/like wearing suspenders, and the listener then assumes they are coming out as transvestite.

Monty Python's lumberjack is I suppose about as comic in 'braces and a bra' as in 'suspenders and a bra'!

My lecturer for assembly / low level computing used to wear braces, I enjoyed the look (and he certainly didn't seem to care what other people thought). As others have said, where what you want!

you can start a new trend

As a balding man, I wear an Aussie outback hat on the advice of my dermatologist. Being older, I no longer care about hat fashion.

Though I discovered that Outback hat makes walking in the Seattle rain quite pleasant!

Oh, and nobody cares what you wear on your head.

In Australia it's generally totally normal to wear a random hat because of the sun!

Also carrying Sun Umbrellas is totally fine as well!

I moved the PNW in 2012 and to deal with the incessant rain, my wife bought me a brown fedora. Nobody wears brown fedora's anymore. But I do, and you'd be shocked at the number of compliments I've received ("Nice hat!" or "I like your hat!") and the number of conversations it's started.

Wear hats. Hats are cool.

My dad took to wearing a Stetson on occasion in his late 40's, around 25 years ago. In Oslo. I'm not sure exactly which type, but one of the fedoras.

I'm not so sure most people in Oslo would have agreed it was "acceptable" but he didn't care, and it's not like anyone would call him out on it.

I'm in my late 40's now, and kinda want to wear a hat but I think I'll pick something which stands out less.

They also seem to enjoy tipping their hats or lifting them momentarily as a greeting or hello.

I get the feeling that these pictures were taken after the fellow passed by in the street and give them a “Good day!” or similar.

You can see various expressions, some which say “and a good day to YOU young man” from some of the older guys to a “hmmph good day” from some of the well dressed women.

This one seems to be the best meme material:

https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/s...

...with one expressing a coy "oh, hi" and the other with the frumpy look-of-disapproval.

Maybe our generation will embrace hybrid hazmat masks/hats like some blip of dystopian horror that future generations can look back on in amusement.

That's bound to be part culture, but I think part circumstance as well - heating and insulation in houses has improved a lot since then.

Here's a street view for the 6th image (man tipping top-hat)

https://goo.gl/maps/Pxh1QRzRgdn5Lrhc6

Very neat. Thanks for sharing.

Curious - I noted the lack of cars and traffic in the old photos. There is none in Street view either!

Many times in Street view for London, it is difficult to see the actual street behind the traffic...

There's likely no space for cars (e.g. parking), since it's an old city center. If there is, it's expensive. People that live in older city centers usually don't have a car, a bicycle and public transit gets them far enough.

That street in particular has been closed for all traffic except buses and trams (and necessary service cars I guess, like the parked van on street view). On [1] you can see Stortingsgata labeled in blue as "kolletivgate" (collective street). As the graphic shows most streets at the very core of the city have been closed to general traffic, the bluish streets are mostly only public transportation and the pinkish streets are mostly pedestrian and bike lanes. Outside the core you see more cars on the roads.

[1] https://gfx.nrk.no/NHMVHfHy9jrQCxlLI_D2tAo9jnkLqfcYXajOAEHna...

kollektivgate = public transport only. I don't think 'collective' is used in the same way in English?

Nice find. Are those the same trees?

Interesting thing is how I kept subconsciously trying to identify where in St Petersburg each of these was taken — the architecture and overall appearance of Oslo at the time was so similar apparently.

That's a neat observation, the cities do have a similar history.

The medieval town called Oslo burned down in 1624, and a new city was founded on the other side of the bay. It was named Christiania after the monarch Christian. It kept that name until 1925 when they changed it back to the old historical name Oslo.

Some decades later, the Russian monarch Peter would also found a new city, which happened to have his name in it. So these two cities were being constructed at around the same time and taking design and architectural inspirations from the same places I would imagine.

The clothing, especially the ladies', look so impractical and uncomfortable.

I they had practical clothes, they wouldn't be ladies.

Cool! Living in Oslo reckognize a lot of these places. Many buildings have not changed. Street layout is very similar.

A lot of downtown Oslo got built around that era.

I see Henrik Ibsen is there. He was probably not hard to capture. He walked down to the Grand Hotel every day like clockwork.

Really weird to see Karl Johan without Nationaltheatret. It got built a few years later.

I'm just thinking of how quiet those cities must be befoul cars

Indeed, yelling of the heralds; and horses in shoes with wooden wheels rotating carts (edit: walking cobblestone roads). Very quiet :)

Wooden wheels with metal threads on topped cobblestones. The noise from roads was infernal. I guess all the horse dung would have dampened it a bit.

You get horseshoes and carts on cobblestones instead, plus the ever present smog of wood and coal fires, the smell of horse dung, etc.

I mean there's plenty of European 'old' city centers that are effectively inaccessible by car, doesn't mean they're quiet.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16049954

I do wonder if this would have been considered creepy back then. Assuming such cameras weren't as prevalent as they are today, it certainly feels like people would have been creeped out if they'd found out about this.

Anyway, love the pictures! I'm glad the student decided to be creepy.

what strikes me the most is the emptiness of the streets!

Everything seems so unnecessary large and calm; The way it should it be, love it!

Wow all of those people seem so miserable. We are so much better off for our technological advancements ;)

Same period as "Hunger" by Knut Hamsun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_(Hamsun_novel)

Interestingly I think that the 1966 movie adaptation visually fits these photographs well.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjEyMTE2ZGYtZjRhNS00...

This is blog spam, dang, link change please?

( https://www.boredpanda.com/spy-camera-secret-street-photogra... )

See? There was no need for a notch even back then!

Couldn't find a single obese person in the photos. Really goes to show how the modern living has destroyed our health

Good observation

Or maybe the photographer simply didn't take pictures of obese people, for whatever reason.

He just didn't photograph them. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2317764

You don't usually see many obese people in Oslo these days either. There's certainly a higher average weight now than in these photos, but US-style excessive obesity is rare in Norway.

Edit: As of 2019, apparently 3 % of Norwegians are obese (BMI >= 35), while a whooping 30 % are bulky or somewhat fat with a BMI of 27-35. Obviously with the shortcomings inherent in BMI, e.g. not accounting for low fat percentage etc. Too bad the data don't go any higher, it would be interesting to see how many are excessively obese, i.e. BMI of, say, 150 or more.

https://www.ssb.no/statbank/table/06181/tableViewLayout1/

Men were so much better dressed back then.

to be fair it's most likely rich people pictured, I would love to see same spy photos from village, I would bet my money people would not be wearing such fancy suits and hats as these urbanites

[1] is a video from a couple decades later (1914) that shows more of the urban middle or lower class folks of Kristiania (it wouldn't be called Oslo until 1925).

[1] https://www.nb.no/nbsok/nb/5d19ec53f24eb5909b9316a833b90c38....

Thanks for sharing that. One thing in common, there certainly were a lot more hats!

well it's still same Oslo, just under different name, definitely not a village, but yeah those market shots seem closer to reality of majority I guess judging by sellers/kids

Old photographs of my Danish town from the 1890s had the same feel and mood. I think it's the empty streets.

I have been so conditioned by the Internet of today that I thought #9 had a play button on it.

Thanks for posting this.

I'm grateful for the images of predecessors, captured when they were going about their daily lives. t looked like they were in the main happy to be alive.

People's styles changed, but cats still look the same!

I assume the cat still has one or two lives left.

We need to talk about casual acceptance of litter and clutter. Clearly it doesn’t have to be that way.

It's not like they lived in a world of takeaway bags with paper cups and disposable cutlery.

There was a time when you'd return bottles to the manufacturer and they were seen as responsible for what they chose to manufacture.

Somewhere down the line, all of this, 100% of it was placed on the end user - as if the billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees and control of an international supply chain has no agency whatsoever to make any decisions at all and they exist as mere errand boys of the supposedly all powerful consumer.

None of these things will be fixable until we collectively stop fantasizing that someone paying $1 for a soda has more power in the fundamental decisions of how it's manufactured than the company's board of directors.

You pose a very valid point and I stand by it. Such an argument is often countered with the cost of rapid progress and providing businesses the autonomy without burdening them with bureaucracy.

Cost is also a factor. These pictures seem to come from an era when there weren't many disposable (cheap) materials found in consumer products. Paper, cloth, glass, metal and wood all could be classified as expensive. One could exchange this scrap with a vendor in exchange for a reasonable amount. Plastics simply don't find a place once separated from the utility they packed. Very little incentive for consumers to take it back even if the manufacturer accepted.

Not simply takeaway, but disposable packaging in general.

We don't actually, because it's obvious; people should put trash in the relevant bins, and the local authorities should pay people to clean it up. Online discourse is not action. Look at e.g. Japan that doesn't have a littering problem, because people don't litter and they pay people to clean up the rest.

But as others pointed out, this was before plastics, before the availability of the wide variety of products and services we have today, before chain fast food restaurants. They would have had (waxed) paper and the like, but not to the point where it was so cheap that it would be everywhere.

People used to dress so cool in the 1890s.

people looked so friendly

Comment deleted because a guy can't state a feeling without dealing with endless pedantry. Gosh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1890s#Wars

The 1890s were a rare break in great power conflict, but they were only a few decades after the civil war, Imperialism was in full swing, and there were still plenty of wars. In general, there has not been a more peaceful time than the present.

Indeed. My point was that the world had not yet been permanently scarred by global conflict. That's all.

There were plenty of world wars before WWI. WWI was simply the first in which America played a major role. The empires fought each other across the planet long before America was a thing. Nearly every country was repeatedly involved in these conflicts. War was not an unussual thing then nor now.

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

"The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) were a series of major global conflicts pitting the French Empire and its allies, led by Napoleon I, against a fluctuating array of European powers formed into various coalitions."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years%27_War

"The Seven Years' War (1756–1763) is widely considered to be the first global conflict in history, and was a struggle for world supremacy between Great Britain and France."

America played large role in its own civil war. And in smaller wars with Mexico and what not before.

Rare break for the West you mean? While the West was breaking, instigating, looting, murdering people in rest of the world like business as usual?

I presume there is some selection bias to take into account here.

Isn't there always some? It's impossible to create a comment that has any nuance without being selective of the feeling that I wish to convey.

Great hats too!

You can find articles that explain various reasons why people don't smile in old photographs, at least when they know they are being photographed. Mimicking what they saw in paintings seems the most likely to me. The advertising around cameras and photos tended to make them painting like, and had more serious subject matter. Though other reasons are cited too...bad teeth, inertia from when exposure times had to be long, etc.

So the smiles could just be the effect of them not knowing they were being photographed.

In general he greeted them before taking the picture, if you do the same today you’ll usually get smiles, especially from those who know you.

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