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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Would be fun to film the same route today, and show them side by side.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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…
I think that OP draws on his family experience where it was like that. People tend to normalize the experience of their family.
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 pitt…
America played large role in its own civil war. And in smaller wars with Mexico and what not before.