It’s World Photography Day.
Earlier this month the Library of Congress shared some wild photos from its collection.
In 1906, photographer A.B. Phelan published a series of photos of what looked like a giant man visiting New York City.
He hangs around outside City Hall, peeking into the windows; he walks the streets of the city, towering way over everybody else’s heads.
It’s a light and fun set of photos, showing how even early photographers found ways to make impossible or fantastic images, long before computers allowed us to bend or shape or generate pretty much any image we could dream up.
There were lots of different ways to make images like these.
Today, with Photoshop and other programs or apps, you can figuratively cut part of an image and paste it into another.
In the old days, photographers could physically cut out one image and paste it into another.
Or, they could do a photomontage and print two separate images as one.
A photographer could take a wide photo of New York City Hall and then take a separate close-up photo of a man and print the two together to make it look like a huge man was outside City Hall.
In those days, photographers could also use physical art supplies to improve or just adjust the look of a photo.
Sometimes this was small-scale touch-up work, like airbrushing someone’s face to make them look fancier.
Other times, it was for less honorable purposes: the leaders of the Soviet Union used to airbrush political rivals out of photos and essentially out of history, and some photographers would claim they’d taken photos of ghosts hovering above a loved one’s head when all they’d done is made a trick photo.
So it’s a good reminder that just because it’s a photo doesn’t mean it’s necessarily accurate.
But it’s also fun to look back at some of these silly and strange images that people made, shared and sold.
The methods may have changed, but the impulses is still the same.
It’s National Aviation Day.
Back in 1971, American Airlines put out an ad where they showed off some of their in-flight amenities, which included a piano bar in the coach lounge.
Technically it was an electric organ, not a piano, but still, did the musician take requests?
A Giant Visitor to New York City (Library of Congress)
Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)
1971 American Airlines “Piano Bar” Commercial (YouTube)
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Photo copyrighted by A. B. Phelan, c1906, via Library of Congress
