Bandit’s Roost (1888), by Jacob Riis, from “How the Other Half Lives.” Bandit’s Roost, at 59½ Mulberry Street (Mulberry Bend), was the most crime-ridden, dangerous part of all New York City.
The Fay Manufacturing Company, 1888
The term “Photoshopping” has these days become synonymous with photo manipulation. But the practice is much older than the computer software — about as old as photography itself.
An exhibition now on display at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art is exploring just that: The collaging, cutting, pasting and coloring that preceded digital photography.
The exhibition raises questions about truth in photography. Is there such a thing? Even if you don’t physically alter the image, isn’t composition itself a form of manipulation?
“Sometimes a photograph can be posed because it excludes something,” film director Errol Morris once said. “Isn’t there always an elephant just outside the frame?” (The Picture Show : NPR)
Photo: Man in bottle, c. 1888 (J.C. Higgins and Son)
speaking of soldiers with cravats…did i ever tell you about the time general custer visted a prominent phrenologist?
On the 18th of May, 1875, a quiet gentleman in plain, citizen’s dress, called at the New York office and requested an examination with a full written description… I had no idea who he was and proceeded with the analysis. As the description was published in full in the Phrenological Journal for Sept., 1876, we make a brief extract:
“Your head, measuring 23 inches, is large, and, as we estimate body and brain, a man with a 23-inch head, to be well proportioned, ought to weigh 175 pounds…In the second place, let us advise you to avoid everything exciting in the way of luxury, condiment, food, or drink; for anything that you eat and drink, which is calculated to heat and inflame the system, sets your nerves on fire, worse than it does those of most men.
“You should always avoid overdoing. It is as natural for you to overdo as it is for birds to spread their wings when they feel in a hurry, and it makes little difference what your business is, you would contrive somehow to overdo at it.
You make work of pleasure. If you were an overworked citizen, and went to the country to rusticate for a month in the summer, you would get up all sorts of enterprises, and excursions to mountain tops, romantic ravines, fishing grounds and what-not; and you would blister your hands with rowing, and your feet with tramping, and your face with unaccustomed exposure to sunshine, and you would be a sort of captain-general of all such doings.”
When I got through dictating and desired to write the name in connection with the notes… he replied quietly, ” Custer.”
…He was then on his way to Phil. Sheridan’s wedding at Chicago, and on the 25th of June, 1876, thirteen months later, he was slaughtered with his command by the Sioux Indians in Montana; a verification of my description of his fiery energy which betrayed him to his doom.
everyone knows that custer died at the battle of little bighorn, what this phrenologist presupposes is that if custer’s forehead was sloped differently, maybe custer would still be alive today.
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source: forty years in phrenology by nelson sizer. 1888.
Forty years in phrenology; embracing recollections of history, anecdote, and experience (1891) at Internet Archive.
