Comments by "Michael Wright" (@michaelwright2986) on "Bernadette Banner" channel.

It looks more like they cut out paper pictures and stuck them up, and then photographed the prepared scene in a straight way. A local professional photographer testified that the imaged hadn't been subjected to photographic manipulation, and they probably hadn't. When I saw the images, I was astonished that anyone could have been fooled by them, but Conan Doyle was deep into spiritualism, and evidently needed to believe. Like believing in aliens, really.
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@chaosPneumatic I think the knowledge of retouching was quite wide-spread. 'Unretouched' is an old expression that means the same as 'no filter'. But you might know or suspect that people didn't look like that, and still be influenced. BTW, it was pretty much all for commercial purposes--the government wasn't using glammed-up photos of Victoria for political purposes.
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Yes indeed. Sargent's Madame X, which initially showed the shoulder strap of an evening gown slipping off the shoulder caused, apparently, major social ructions which affected both Sargent and Madame Gautreau for a while.
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@GoGoSachiko When he was young, he seems to have been physically attractive, and he was highly educated, as well as King of England. He didn't age well, though.
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@cynicismpiee He really could not have had anyone executed for not marrying him, especially the royal foreign women. Anne Boleyn is supposed to have held out on him and wouldn't have sex with him before they were married (though her sister hadn't bothered about that).
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One of the things with early portraits is that they were often made with lenses with very shallow depth of field, so that blurs the details except in a narrow plane. And there was, you know, make up--though that was more for professional image-wielders and the movies. But mostly, being a photographic retoucher was one of those common jobs that has disappeared, like being a musician playing in the orchestra in a cinema in the days before the talkies.
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@ИмяФамилия-ф2д8ш In this case, I don't really think it's excusable. Have you seen the pictures? The fairies really are obvious paper cut-outs, just stuck up on sticks in front of the girls. And in the late 19th and early 20th centuries people were well aware of photo manipulation. A lot of the first 'art photographs' were elaborate composite prints composed from many negatives: the most famous one is Oscar Reijlander's 'Two Ways of Life', which is reproduced in the Wikipedia article on Reijlander. And then there was all the retouching, as a matter of course.
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I think it's also true that the Victorians were smaller than us--in all dimensions, I mean. But if people obsess on waist measurements, this can be misleading, because it ignores the proportions. And, yes, photo-retouching was a major profession.
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Of course I loved this; but maybe it's worth putting the point that radical anachronism is deep in the DNA of romance, or at least the only type of romance I know anything about. The medieval Arthurian romance is set in a pretty precise historical period, 5th century CE. But the fashions, both in clothing, arms, and social manners are always bang up to date. Chrestien de Troyes, who seems to have invented Lancelot, at least as the figure who dominates the Arthuriad, could be read as part of a movement to bring men of the knightly class out of the state of brutish warriordom into modern, refined, 12th century psychological interiority. And so it goes, down to the guns in Malory. I have sadly little knowledge of women's clothing in the Middle Ages, but in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight there is a low-cut number which has nothing to do with the 5th century, or the 12th. Maybe there's a distinction between Romance, which is always about the present, and the Historical Novel, which is about the past (in so far as History is about the past)? With Historical Romance as a hybrid?
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Wonderful and informative (and includes guinea pig). One thing I only know by hearsay but seems to be true: there are two sorts of sweat glands, and it's the apocrine that are productive of odour. East Asian people typically have fewer of these glands (and can think that Europeans are pretty smelly), and the smelly glands are concentrated in the armpits and the groin. So, if you're European, and you wash the hairy bits regularly (with a cloth, even), you're not going to smell bad. Homeless people deprived of the chance to bath/shower: if you're in Australia or New Zealand, check out the charity Orange Sky--hugely creative thinking, good for people.
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Magnificent. There's another myth, that the Victorians were so scandalised by legs that they put skirts on chairs and tables. This is palpably false, but survives as a myth even among people who are educated in the literature of the 19th c. I wonder if we can blame Lytton Strachey? On an entirely different note, the sight of you making Victorian pin-up with a drone is a resounding anachronism.
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@GoodPersonTestWebsite Overexposure was more a trick of 1960s fashion photography--all those harsh, grainy photographs of skinny models in mini-dresses and no skin texture whatever.
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