Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Headless! PhotoShop Before PhotoShop

Oh, those wacky Victorians! Did we ever underestimate just how far they'd go for a laugh?!?

Photography was hardly new and not exactly a novelty in the Victorian world, so experimenting with effects was a game many photographers played. Double and triple exposures helped create one of the truly interesting and popular photographic oddities of the time: the misplaced head. (Story here.)
Victorians loved the dead, even their phony images.

There was also a little pre-PhotoShop PhotoShop that took a lot of time, effort and skill (here).

These special effects are not as slick and clean as today's, but the crudeness of the technology of the time make them all the more impressive. Not to mention pretty damn creepy.

If you look closely at some of the pictures, you can see the lengths the photographer went to in the darkroom to remove the head and place it in a spot where it would gather a few responses (like, "Oh, Shit!")

Can you imagine how difficult this one was to put together?



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