The black hole photographs: Unpublished images from America’s great depression
flashbak.com
flashbak.com
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@dang if you see this, could you change the url to the loc.gov link and the title to "The Black Hole Photographs: Unpublished Images from America’s Great Depression"
> Plenty of very similar photos were published.
Do you have an example, from when this person was leading the organization?
The censored nonsense in the article is simply not true.
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.
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.
In that case, why was it necessary to mutilate the negatives? Why not just chuck them in the skip? That's why I called it vandalism.
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 still seems rather destructive; celluloid film was pricey, so I thought they used to re-use it.
For example, here's the allegedly "censored" picture of a young woman carrying cranberries: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017723882/resource/
And here's the very next photo on the film, without a hole punch: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/fsa.8a10082/
The only thing this tells us is that the editor preferred the wide angle shot.
Boy with cranberry scoop: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017723915/resource/
Gathering cranberries in a flooded bog (not sure what a bog is): https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017723887/resource/
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.
Tx for correcting it.
Really interesting.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072742/
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."
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
Is it?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...
Regardless, it's somewhat avoidable by buying produce from local sources or from organic farms.
(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.
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.
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.
https://ur.umich.edu/0910/Oct05_09/19.php#:~:text=The%20rese....
On the other hand back in the 1920s there were fat men clubs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_men%27s_club
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'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.
Sure, but Photoshop (for example) has a feature that does just that: Content-Aware Fill. https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/content-aware-fill.h...
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.
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.
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.
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.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30281686
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.
If you define "represent reality" as "lie in a convincing way", then maybe. But, it has zero with reality.
But that is likely to mislead people into thinking that what filled the hole is what was really there at the time.
Even small errors can radically change an image, as this (super-resolution rather than content-aware-fill) example shows: https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-machin...
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.
Don't buy the "censored" garbage the article is peddling, it's not true.
Some of the photos are obviously flawed or uninteresting, but others look good and even touching. Why ruin them?
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.
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)?
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.
Where?
https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Roy-Stryker-... for example is a simple fix. Its something I can do now with, even with my skills.
https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/killed-photo...
That however would require someone skilled with photoshop. You'd need to find and blend in a cat's face. Its not impossible, but its hard.
But then we get to: https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Roy-Stryker-...
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.
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?
Lack of dental and fluoridated water may be another factor. I suspect back then it was also more common to smoke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_School_Lunch_Act
https://www.thecongressproject.com/national-school-lunch-act...
> 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.
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.
That sounds really made up.
See here: https://time.com/4568032/smile-serious-old-photos/
Tangentially: only because the winter olympics are on, but do there exist snowboarders that have anything but perfect teeth?
Rich and poor both get the same junk food and soft food as kids, but rich have orthodontists.
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)
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.
https://dentalsolutionsofencinitas.com/blog/tooth-loss-age/
>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.
I also have multiple teeth being resorbed, a weird thing that the dentist says nobody knows why it happens, and it has nothing to do with dental care.
Take a look at some older people. They may not have lost all their teeth, but you can see the crowns and false teeth.
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.
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!
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.
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.
The working mens' clothes look very comfortable to me.
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 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.
But yeah, dental care, sunblock, and a shower can go a long way.
- 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!
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.
https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Roy-Stryker-...
https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Roy-Stryker-...
https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Roy-Stryker-...
> 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 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.
Photos of British troops in WWII often show terrible looking teeth, not just on one unfortunate but whole groups of people.
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.
But what is also interesting to me is that there weren't any wonky faces, lopsided smiles, droopy eyes.
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!)
Isn't that Walter White?