
Posters of the golden age of Soviet cosmonauts - coloneltcb
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34281621
======
pvg
The last poster

[http://i.imgur.com/R6ouayv.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/R6ouayv.jpg)

is not just showing some random "elongated triangle".

The monument to "The Conquerors of Space" in Moscow (completed earlier):

[http://i.imgur.com/7f6KY7r.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/7f6KY7r.jpg)

~~~
chiph
I thought the first one was a stylized ringworld until I saw the rocket at the
top.

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rodionos
This graphics style is quite distinctive. I wish books, ads and even magazines
would adopt it instead of crafting special effects in Photoshop. Disappearance
of artist-made drawings is really unfortunate, especially in such categories
as children books.

~~~
frozenport
Worse than that, many people don't expect photographs to be Photoshopped, when
most are.

~~~
rimantas
It's like saying "many people don't expect books to be proof-read, when most
are".

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> It's like saying "many people don't expect books to be proof-read, when most
> are".

It's not. Books are written by humans. You expect them to contain fiction or
opinion. Pictures are taken by mechanical equipment with no agenda. "The
camera never lies" etc. Obviously you can also stage a photograph
unrepresentative of reality using techniques other than Photoshop, but the
general expectation is that what you see in a photograph is what you would
have seen with your own eyes if you had been there at the time.

But people also blame Photoshop when the problem is endemic. Only people with
certain body types are hired in Hollywood. Then they have professional makeup
artists and hair stylists make them up like a plastic doll, _and then_ the
pictures are photoshopped.

I suspect a big part of the reason the criticism is rarely taken seriously is
that the proposed alternative of "normal" people is so obviously the wrong
one. The average American is overweight and doesn't get enough exercise.
People aren't going to want to look at that or be inspired to look like that,
nor should they be. But the concept that the represented ideal physical
appearance should resemble real athletes rather than stick figures _or_ couch
potatoes doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone.

~~~
superuser2
There are a great many choices made between photons striking the sensor and
photons from your computer screen striking your eyes. In the absence of
Photoshop, they're made by an engineering team's best guess at a general
procedure for transforming the raw electrical data into a photorealistic
scene, but these algorithms do not have a special claim on the truth and the
parameters they choose are not necessarily "right." In some situations (such
as rooms with unusual color-temperature light sources) they are unambiguously
wrong.

Professionals use Photoshop when they disagree with the choices made by the
on-camera chip, which is almost all of the time. Working from RAW, you can
start fresh from something closer to raw sensor data and move the sliders for
yourself. But _those sliders have to be somewhere_ , effectively, and taking
manual control of them (or overriding them with further transformations)
doesn't make a photo less real. It's much more like copy-editing.

Most images you see are Photoshopped, but most of the editing (and all of the
editing in journalism) is done with the intention of making the photo a more
accurate representation of what the photographer saw.

Where you get people editing photos to make them _more_ than what was really
there is in art. Ansel Adams made choices in the darkroom motivated by
aesthetics rather than accuracy, and he was damn good at it. I'm sure most
glamour photographers would tell you they're engaged in a similar kind of
artistry.

I'm less interested in fashion magazines creating unrealistic representations
of the human form than why people believe these are credible ideals to aspire
to, rather than mildly amusing curiosities.

~~~
Symbiote
Dove (European cosmetics company) ran these two adverts:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U)
(shows a woman's face)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17j5QzF3kqE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17j5QzF3kqE)
(whole body, might be NSFW in the US)

The Photoshop manipulation has very little distortion — the camera engineer
could not have produced these images, and the intention is entirely to make
the image /less/ like what the photographer saw.

(It isn't just women. Yesterday's junk catalogue is illustrated with perfect-
looking children and teenagers, sometimes with perfect-looking parents.)

[Edited links, I pasted them the wrong way around.]

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vitalysalnikov
Awesome and very patriotic posters. In post-USSR countries every child knows
who are Y. Gagarin, S. Korolev and V. Tereshkova. I think not only in post-
USSR.

~~~
yareally
I didn't know who Korolev was until I watched a series[1] the BBC did about
him and his Western Counterpart, Wernher von Braun. I knew since I was a kid
who Gagarin was of course, from being the first man in space, but I don't
believe it was ever mentioned in history class while in school (I just
happened to read a lot on my own).

Sadly, we barely even touch on NASA astronauts in school in the United States
anymore. I just happen to love history and had parents that also did. I live
in Neil Armstrong's home state and if you're ever in Ohio, there's a pretty
interesting (and free) museum in his home town about his life and the Apollo
Missions.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Race_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Race_\(TV_series\))

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_Air_and_Space_Museum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_Air_and_Space_Museum)

~~~
pavel_lishin
I don't remember ever learning about Gagarin in school, growing up in Russia.
But I knew it none-the-less, because his statue always greeted me whenever I
left my apartment.

[http://havecamerawilltravel.com/yuri-gagarin-monument-
moscow](http://havecamerawilltravel.com/yuri-gagarin-monument-moscow)

~~~
eps
Growing up in Russia too, I call bullshit. That's just not possible. You
learnt Lenin, then you learnt Gagarin.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Maybe I just don't remember it. I left when I was 10. Perhaps my teachers were
just crap?

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dogma1138
The old soviet space religion, that's one thing that should've been preserved
from the USSR.

~~~
kushti
There are many other things worth to be mentioned. E.g. nature preserving
approach of early Soviet days
[http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/ecology/ussr_ecology.ht...](http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/ecology/ussr_ecology.htm),
or no plastic post-consumer waste.

~~~
theoh
Without intending to liken the USSR to Nazi Germany, the Nazis also had very
"green" policies. Why suggest that conservation on the early soviet model
should be revisited when in fact you just want conservation, but for different
reasons and from a different kind of state?

What I've written doesn't sound very clear but the point I'm trying to make is
that even a misguided state can get some things right. That doesn't mean those
things can only be got right by that kind of state, or that we should call for
those things to be administered by such a state in perpetuity...

~~~
calibraxis
No one said that. Just that the Soviets had useful cultural aspects worth
adopting. "We are used to thinking of the Politburo as a group of
unimaginative gray bureaucrats, but they were bureaucrats who dared to dream
astounding dreams." ([http://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-
declinin...](http://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-
rate-of-profit))

Both the US and former Soviet Union are culturally backwards in many ways, but
each has aspects worth learning from. One can easily think of societies
improved beyond both "theirs & ours," which also unleash imagination.

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ivanb
More Soviet awesomeness on the covers of magazine "Technology - Youth"

[http://feldgrau.info/64-2010-09-02-12-20-17/5664-70s-soviet-...](http://feldgrau.info/64-2010-09-02-12-20-17/5664-70s-soviet-
technology-youth-magazine-covers)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%BA%D0%B8+%D0%B6%D1%83%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B0+%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%85%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0+%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B4%D1%91%D0%B6%D0%B8&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CCQQsARqFQoTCMiTh52rhcgCFWV3cgodQAkM9g&biw=1830&bih=960#)

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sethbannon
Very neat. Would love to see the American equivalents. Anyone have a link?

~~~
RobertKerans
I'd guess it's a wee bit difficult to provide that: [saying this as a
designer/illustrator with a deep interest in the subject] Soviet design
inherited rules from artists involved at the start of the revolution, and was
formalised via government-run technical schools and propaganda bureaus, so
there was a constant stream of highly public stuff in this style, which
covered print, architecture, products etc. In the US, bar propaganda during
the war, there was never close to the same formal propaganda structure, so
though there are are isolated examples, it was always more ad hoc: good
design/illustration was always commercial (as a side note, classic sci-
fi/popular mechanics covers were very heavily informed by Soviet space
propaganda posters). Closest you'd get is probably postage stamps. NASA has
some stuff archived, but it's not the same, it's just prosaic designs with
stuff like a photo of the crew of a mission. I assume it wasn't promoted with
the same religious fervour in the US, no creation of secular ikons

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DanBC
There are (were) books collecting Soviet political posters.

Here's one example: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Soviet-Political-
Posters-1917-80/dp/...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Soviet-Political-
Posters-1917-80/dp/0140081879)

That one is lovely; A3 with reasonable printing. I'm a bit surprised there
aren't more books. The posters cover a wide range of propaganda - including
public health.

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MengerSponge
The Cosmonauts exhibit is fantastic, if you manage to make it to London before
next March.

~~~
mino
Indeed. I'm volunteering at that exhibit and it is really well presented.

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achalshah
There's a good interview with the curators of the museum here:
[http://calvertjournal.com/features/show/4654](http://calvertjournal.com/features/show/4654).

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azinman2
Last one is my favorite. Very cool.

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ramgorur
very cool, I am going to use one of them as my wall-paper.

