Check it out! Jerry Doggett and Vin Scully are glued together! GLUED!! Published in The Los Angeles Times on Sept. 2, 1958. Glue and all. Oh you photogs (or more likely the guys in the art department, sez Howard Decker). As Gary Metzker would say: "They are out of control." When I showed this to Davan Maharaj, he called it "X-acto Shop." Anybody who did this today would be out on their ear.
(Los Angeles Times file photo(s)
The Beacon Journal did the same thing, though they didn't run it like that picture. On
ReplyDeleteSaturdays the Beacon hired some high school kids to conduct tours. I heard one tour guide explain in front of the art department door "This is the art department but they are not really artist, they just retouch the pictures that the photographers loused up."
...Ott
today that tour guide is probably some guy running a paper that fired all the non-artist photo retouchers.
ReplyDeletein the bj art dept. we did all kinds of "minor" picture "adjustments".
once, when deer were much rarer in the area, someone called and said there was a deer on the lawn of stan hywett. a photog raced out but, of course the deer was gone. well it was too good a photo to waste so we just went to the morgue and pulled out a pix of a deer and had photo copy it to size. we just cut it into the photo of stan hywett and lo and behod a photo of a deer on the lawn at the mansion running in the next day's paper.
someone got nearly fired (or maybe did - happened before my time) for airbrushing another leg on a skier. only problem was the photo was of a amputee skiing competition. the guy only HAD one leg.
there were a million times we did "fbi" work. expertly faked photos that you would never know it was faked when it ran in the paper.
i was off the day they took a group photo of all the under 30 staffers for a house ad. i just got a photo of myself copied down and plopped my head between a couple other folks. it looked perfect.
we always had kinda weird requests come in. one time there was an unidentified dead woman in the morgue that the coroner asked if we could run a pix, maybe a reader would id her. well we couldn't run a picture of a dead woman, eyes closed, with a bullet hole in her forehead. i just airbrushed out the bullet hole and opened her eyes.
she had a pretty strange stare but did look kinda alive.
we took drinks out of hands for "society" pictures. took head shots of football players in uniforms and put a white shirt and tie on them for all star teams and on and on.
then it was considered ok, today not so much especially with photoshop which can be done perfectly with not a trace of tampering.
x-acto shop was a whole lot more fun.
art krummel
The trick I remember best is when we ran photos of new home developments where landscaping was not finished. The art department wwould just put in a perfect new lawn. I cold use something like that on my lawn right now.
ReplyDeleteWhat folks don't seem to realize is that example of 'exacto-shop' was not at all that unusual. Photos were routinely retouched because the films of that day simply were not fast enough to capture all the detail for good reproduction. Under exposed and over exposures photos were the rule in those days and I was taught from day one to develop techniques to 'enhance' a photo to achieve the best reproduction on newsprint. We worked together with the photographers to ensure the best possible results. It was also routine for an editor to request that a profile photo be 'flopped' so it wouldn't look off the side of the page. Usually no one noticed.
ReplyDeleteOf course with the advent of the digital age and the concurrent growth of conspiracy theorists and the ethical police, this practice has become untenable. More's the pity. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
Pat Dougherty
been there and had that done a time or two. that way you got folks close and could dummy in a 2 column photo instead of wasting space on 3 columns
ReplyDeleteWe got in trouble with AP over this. There was a fire across the street from Goodyear and the fire department used their foam truck, which was new, it was one of the first time they had used it. I shot a bunch of pictures of two firemen that were kneeling/sitting on the pavement, up to their shoulders in foam, hosing down the fire. Interesting picture. Giles was ME. Wanted to use it for one-star, replacing picture used in earlier editions. Problem, my shot was horizontal, earlier picture was vertical. He sent it to art department and Joe Grace made it a vertical. I had lots of verticals of same shot. We were close to deadline, but I still had time to make a print. Instead, Joe did a quick and dirty job of chopping the picture, with the quality of our reproduction, it didn't have to be that good. Giles decide he wanted it offered to AP, said to write a caption and transmit it. I asked him, "are you sure you want this picture?" Told him I could make an unedited print the same size. He said to transmit the doctored picture. Naturally, the cut edges showed up. The network went crazy. AP raised hell. Poor Joe, said if knew that that particular picture was going to be transmitted, he would have made sure it wouldn't show. Giles later became the chairman of the AP Managing Editors ethical committee.
ReplyDeleteAnd ... just how many "Magic" footballs and basketballs appeared where they had never been. Was it really faking, or just fudging a little bit.
ReplyDeleteDon Roese