Almost as soon as photography was perfected for use by the general public, artists and others began to manipulate the images. Beginning with daguerrotypes, photographers used double exposures to create humorous effects. Photographers combined images from different negatives to create novelty photos. The headless ones were extremely popular. Photographers and retouching specialists would scrape their film with knives, draw or paint on top of it.
"Spirit" photography used multiple exposures to depict the subject with ghostly presences in the same image.
"Spirit" photograph, by John K. Hallowell, Chicago,
Illinois. Supposedly taken during a seance, actually a double exposure
or composite of superimposed cutouts, showing a woman with
head-and-shoulders portraits of men and women around her head. Image: Library of Congress
Portrait Photography
Oh, those lovely, creamy smooth complexions of the Victorian era. But were they really? Today, in order to give our own selfies a peaches and cream glow, we often use an application in our cell phones, such as a "soften face" feature.
In the 1800s, "the dominant photographic print at this time was called the albumen silver print, and was produced by coating paper with a mixture of egg whites and salt, and dipping it into silver nitrate. The paper was then placed in contact with the negative and exposed to light. Before printing their photographs, photographers would use pencils to manually scratch touch-ups onto the negatives themselves. They developed a variety of scratch techniques either to shade or highlight their images—for example, they’d use a fine-pointed pencil to add highlights, or a blunt pencil and “cross-hatching” technique to brighten up parts of the face". Smithsonian. The actual negatives looked pretty strange. People’s faces appeared scratched, cracked, or pockmarked, depending on the photographer’s technique. But the scratches didn’t appear in the final print. Instead, the small scratches showed up as a cheek-bone defining shadow or a healthy glow—creating with a pencil some of the same effects today’s photo editors are achieving digitally.
Below, the cabinet card on the left shows a nice, glowing face. On the right, modern scanning and enlarging shows the small, white dots and lines used to highlight and smooth.
Photographer Tony Richards owns several old plates that were used to make albumen prints in the mid-to-late 1800s. Richards found that the plates have “pencil marks” on the emulsion side — the retouchers permanently scratched their edits into the original glass plates. The woman above and below are two examples showing the white pencil lines and dots, which may fill in lines, cover spots, or add highlights. Photographer Link
The Wasp Waist
What about photos of those poor women who supposedly laced themselves so tightly they broke ribs, redistributed their internal organs or fainted dead away? So many of these photos used manipulation, such as the infamous painted triangles. Look closely at the below portraits. You can see the poorly executed waist-whittling techniques used by the photographer. These are all painted in at the waist. Why, even Queen Maud wasn't averse to a little touch up here!
Right, a close up of her painted in waist.
Yes, a tiny waist was desirable, but only a small number of women did extreme corseting. The Empress Elizabeth of Austria (tall at 5'8" and an average of 110 pounds) was obsessed with dieting, exercise and tight-lacing. From 1862 until her death in 1898, her clothing measured 18 1/2 – 19 1/2 inches around the waist, which prompted the Prince of Hesse to describe her as “almost inhumanly slender”.
The average Victorian corseted waist measurements varied between 23 to 31 inches. Larger corsets of 32-36 inches and above were also available.
A small waist is also a visual illusion. Women would cinch their waists in while they padded their hips and the side lines of the bust to make themselves look as much like an hourglass as possible.
The Retouching Desk
"The central frame held a piece of glass onto which the negative was
placed. Attached to the base, an adjustable mirror or piece of white
cardstock reflected light up through the negative. An overhanging piece
of wood—sometimes accompanied by built-in side curtains or a piece of
fabric thrown over the whole contraption—prevented light from shining on
the negative from above. The retoucher was told to set up the
retouching desk in front of a north-facing window, as light from the
north “is the least variable,” according to one 1898 retouching guide. Most retouching took place on the film side of a negative-the one covered with the photographic emulsion.
Image credits: The book of photography; practical, theoretical and applied, via Archive.org // Public Domain
To lighten small sections of the negative, the retoucher would use a
sharp blade to shave away the dark film, little by little, thus subduing
the highlight in the final print."
Jocelyn Sears for Mental Floss
In conclusion, an 1881 book titled "The Art and Practice of Silver Painting" give us great advice that is useful today about going overboard on retouching:
“An old man without wrinkles is an unnatural and ghastly object—the ‘marble brow’ of the poet should be left to literature.” "It is very wrong to touch out all the character in the face of your otherwise fine ‘old sea-captain.’”
“An old man without wrinkles is an unnatural and ghastly object—the ‘marble brow’ of the poet should be left to literature.” "It is very wrong to touch out all the character in the face of your otherwise fine ‘old sea-captain.’”
Submitted by Shenandoah Rose
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