Black and White

I love looking at old photos especially ones from the time when photography first was popularized. They have a really eerie quality to them that's fascinating to me. 


In early portraits its cool to look at how different the style of dress was and compare the idiosyncrasies of fashion back then to today.

The Sartorialist is doing a contest on his blog about old photographs that display fashion. Check out his blog - there are much better photographs there than I can supply on my blog. Fear of copyright infringement leads me to choose from safe avenues like Wikipedia or the Life photo archive (which consists of mainly famous, widely circulated photos) so I won't get into trouble.


I wonder when people started doing the whole "smile into the camera thing" because when you look at early portrait photography the people aren't usually looking directly at the camera, much less smiling into it, which adds to the eerie-ness factor. 


I did find some Civil War era photos that show more of an acknowledgment of the camera. Maybe it has something to do with the proximity of the subject to the camera. If you're closer to it, it makes it harder to ignore?

Then there are old photographs that you see and you feel something, a palpable sense of time and place. A photo that elicits emotion and reflection:

That image of Abe Lincoln gets to me. A towering figure in the picture (and in American history for that matter) he's also the one that seems the least defined...

Then from still photography came film- "moving pictures".  Below is the first known film recorded. The user on youtube describes it well if you wanna know more about it!

In the decades proceeding the first known film came Hollywood and the star system. The star system in turn produced iconic photographs of movie stars that adolescents admire in their bedrooms and that fashionistas drool over for their displays of style.

After the classic Hollywood period color came into photos and film and something changed with that. Color does something to images, to people that I can't really explain. The shadows in early photographs created not only an eerieness but established a sense of distance from people living then to those in the modern era because of the odd quality it gave to human figures.  There's something about color that distracts from human subjects and glosses them over... as if black and white photography shows truth more than color?