For me, this is the most important point of the article:
And although, as Knoll is quick to point out, photos were being altered long ago in Soviet Russia, it was only Photoshop that democratised that ability. In a way Jennifer was the last person to sit on solid ground, gazing out into an infinitely fluid sea of zeros and ones, the last woman to inhabit a world where the camera never lied.
We now live in a world where anything we see, we hear, or speak is never taken on its value any more. You can have a picture of you standing next to Kim Kardashian and everybody will wonder if its actually you standing next to her - or did you manipulate the photo? You can watch a video and we now wonder if what we're seeing is actually real or not.
This photo was the last off ramp to a reality where nothing truly is what it seems anymore. I never thought or could imagine the world I currently reside in.
Forging photos before Photoshop was the work of nation states - and skepticism was low, a fabricated truth was readily accepted.
Photoshop _should_ have destroyed that, but the skill and time to fabricate truth was still high; skepticism remained low.
Now, with AI, the cost of fabricating truth is rapidly approaching zero. Within the last year, nearly everyone I talk to is skeptical of nearly everything. They see an image, or read an article, and wonder if they're being bamboozled.
I see this as a net positive. We are counterintuitively rediscovering skepticism by democratizing nation-state propaganda.
I believe this is a printing press moment, where truth will be spoken to power once again. I just hope we avoid the bloodshed that that the printing press wrought.
> Forging photos before Photoshop was the work of nation states
That might be a bit of an overstatement. There were plenty of non-nation states doing image manipulation before digital image manipulation. Double exposure, piecing together negatives and retouching for example was done early in photography's history.
Just one example from ~1850:
> Henry Peach Robinson [...] was an English pictorialist photographer best known for his pioneering combination printing - joining multiple negatives or prints to form a single image;
Indeed. At summer camp at age 8, I brushed my face into a photograph of the Grand canyon, by making a mask with an air brush and double exposing it into the photo paper sitting in emulsion.
> I see this as a net positive. We are counterintuitively rediscovering skepticism by democratizing nation-state propaganda.
I think you've just described converting a high-trust society into a low-trust one, and I am inclined to think that this is not a good development. That might result in some healthy scepticism of authority, but it'll also get you a thousand Alex Jones and two thousand No Plane Theories.
> I believe this is a printing press moment, where truth will be spoken to power once again. I just hope we avoid the bloodshed that that the printing press wrought.
I, too, would like all of the possible good things and none of the possible bad things from any given technological change. Hoping for that won't help much; it might be good, might suck, or somewhere in between and we find some way to muddle through.
> You can have a picture of you standing next to Kim Kardashian
> and everybody will wonder if its actually you standing next
> to her - or did you manipulate the photo?
Cameras have always lied. you are viewing a narrow slice of reality frozen in time. this slice has been carefully constructed by the author to show a specific thing. What is the author not showing, what was deliberately left out of the slice? The biggest lie is that there is no lie.
When I was in high school, I was taught basic darkroom techniques for altering film postfacto -- even doing so without doing a negative transfer -- by an old artist friend of mine.
If you're willing to do some basic home chemistry, you can do quite a few things to film during development that will alter in predictable ways the outcome; a favorite of mine is that adding a small amount of buffer solution into your developer and stop bath at the right time can adjust the light curves, which can turn a nighttime photo into a daytime photo if you do it right.
Do you remember or have a link to what buffer you use, and how much? Which paper developers it works with?
I skimmed _The Darkroom Cookbook_, and saw cold/neutral/warm toning paper developers, but didn't see any mention of adding a buffer solution to modify an existing paper developer like you mentioned. I might have missed it.
That sounds like an interesting effect, and I still print from time to time if I can convince myself to drag my enlarger upstairs. (I also have a lot of poorly exposed nighttime shots I'd like to see if I can recover.)
There are ways around that. Apple & Google can embed a private key into the Secure Enclave, sign every image with this key, and at the same time write the hash onto a fast public ledger (e.g. Solana). This validates that this specific image was taken at that specific point in time. Doing it that way would validate the image. That would lead to a world where only these "vetted" images can be trusted and untrusted devices (e.g. Nikon cameras) can take nice pictures but no "truthy" pictures. But it would be an escape hatch.
What if I held up a display in front of that "verified sensor" that shows the manipulated image? Then you'd end up with a "100%, absolutely verified image" of a manipulated image.
This would be counterproductive, it would make "in-camera" fakes more convincing. For instance, political provocateurs could use actors/makeup/etc to stage a scene then take "vetted" photographs of that.
Indeed, this concept has a concrete standard in progress (originating from Adobe, Microsoft, and the BBC) with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA):
C2PA as far as I remember doesn't require a transparency log, but as you mention it could be a good fit as well. Besides Solana, https://transparency.dev/ could be a good option (used as part of Certificate Transparency and Sigstore).
Oh my god. The demo video using the super-early version of Photoshop just taught me several things the lasso and magic wand tools can do in combo that I’ve never known, despite a lot of time using them over the years.
It's hilarious to see all the comments on the video[0] exclaiming at how advanced Photoshop 1.0 was. Indeed, it was a huge advancement in graphics editing at the time, and computers "back then" were capable of quite a lot of stuff. I think if everyone got stuck using a desktop computer from the 90's for a while they'd realize just how little has changed since then (or how much has been just slight iteration) :)
It’s truly depressing that almost none of the reasons that 512MB is no longer a luxurious amount of memory have to do with software being more capable and useful than it used to be.
It is a photo that lends itself to photoshopping. Wide vista with distinct objects that do not interact. Solid borders between objects (horizon, green island on blue sky). Blocks of relatively homogenous texture. A near total lack of shadows, with the only one visible conveniently blurred by shallow water. And a subject exotic/remote enough that most people will not recognize any inconsistencies. It is so open to editing that I could believe it was built from scratch.
There's nothing sexualised about it. The person is of an ambiguous build and facing away from the camera. The article does more sexualising than the photo itself does, in the typical way that British media likes to oversexualise and play scandal to sell papers.
To me it clearly seems to be a woman, and perhaps I'm just revealing my own overly prudish nature, but to me a topless woman in just tiny bikini bottoms at a beach is somewhat sexualised.
Imagine it were a photo of a good looking man wearing almost nothing and suggestive of some exposure if only you were looking from another angle. Would that have done so well?
I think it's just hard for us as men to recognise the sexism because we're not used to being systematically sexualised.
> I think it's just hard for us as men to recognise the sexism because we're not used to being systematically sexualised.
Not true. Men get all sorts of comments about their height, appearance, facial hair, even genital size... We can not work at some jobs because of oversexualization.
And libido, that is, a stereotype that men are by default sexual predators. This is one reason why you don't see many men working at day cares and elementary schools.
Probably your cultural background. The attitudes towards nakedness are very different across cultures. Your attitude seem to be that if you sexualize the back of a women it is the woman who is the problem and should be covered up.
> Your attitude seem to be that ... it is the woman who is the problem and should be covered up.
100% not. In fact it's the opposite: you're supposing that a woman in swimwear at a beach is giving implied consent for her image to be used in a radically different context. That would put the onus on the woman to cover up in a way that I wouldn't.
In any case, I think the bigger problem is actually for instead those people in the business environment where this appears. Is it really a surprise that a semi-nude image used for illustrating image processing software is of a woman? Do you honestly think it is just as a likely as a man? I know the term "micro aggression" is controversial but sexist choices like this are real and common and do have an impact on attitudes for both men and women.
> you're supposing that a woman in swimwear at a beach is giving implied consent for her image to be used in a radically different context.
Are you suggeting he used the image of his wife without her consent? That would indeed be inappropriate, but the article does not seem to support this accusation. The quote from her imply she is fine with it:
> "The beauty of the internet is that people can take things, and do what they want with them, to project what they want or feel," she says.
Do you feel the statue of David is sexual and/or sexist? What about the numerous Greek statues of completely nude, anatomically-accurate men?
Given my cultural background, it disturbs me that you’ve sexualized this photo enough to start casting the shadow of sexist offenses onto others, when it’s an opportunity for self-reflection. Why are you sexualizing this photo?
> Do you feel the statue of David is sexual and/or sexist?
I'm not the person you asked but I feel like answering with my (unwanted) perspective. The statue of David, in its current context in a museum is not a particuarly sexual or sexist object. On the other hand if my employer (or whoever) started introducing equivalent statues of naked people (of any sex) into my workplace I would probably view that as innapropriate.
This is essentially how I view the image of Jennifer - in the context of a loving relationship between two people on the beach its a nice thing, but I would view it as a bit weird if someone at my workplace started sharing an equivalent picture of their partner.
> The question is - is it you or Michelangelo who is the problem?
Clearly in the context of my comment its neither. Its whoever is bringing the naked statues into my workplace.
This (to me) is such a blindingly obvious third option that I assume you deliberately didn't include it as an option because you're trying to argue a point you know is flawed.
You are assuming the art-less workplace is the natural default. I’m from a culture where having art in the workplace and in public spaces is common and generally appreciated.
I think you're assuming that the way people interact with something is independent of its context.
The impact of (to take a random example) a university having a statue of Venus or whatever in the grounds, is not the same as having the Lenna image in a textbook
> I think you're assuming that the way people interact with something is independent of its context.
I’m unable to comprehend how you got to that assumption.
But to be clear, I undestand you shouldn’t bring art or musical instruments to work if you work for the Taleban. But in the story, the audience are adult creatives working professionaly with visual arts
> I’m unable to comprehend how you got to that assumption.
Because you conflate art in public spaces with the use of images like Jennifer in selling software. To me it seems obvious that these are fundamentally not the same.
If you are on the beach with them, sure. If you stick it in a PowerPoint in an office, that's a different matter. (Same as if it's a nearly-naked man for that matter.)
How and why does this make it a different matter? Photographs capture a moment in time. This moment occurred at a beach. It wasn’t sexual then, and it’s not sexual now.
If someone manipulated the image to be explicit or presented it in an obviously sexual context, that might be a different story, but even then, the original image itself was never inherently sexual.
I’d reframe this to point out the image is very natural, i.e. what could be more natural than experiencing nature in one’s natural state?
Seeing this as something sexual is a choice, and an unnecessary one at that.
> How and why does this make it a different matter?
Context is important. I've spent time on nude beaches, that doesn't mean its appropriate to turn up to work with my dick out. What is appropriate in one place is weird in other places (it would also be weird to rock up to a nude beach in my work clothes).
Appropriateness is orthogonal to sexualization though.
Yes, context matters, but I fail to see anything about this particular context shift that is inherently sexual.
It’s also worth pointing out that exposing your genitalia is in a different category than taking your top off, and certainly different than implied toplessness.
I fully agree that being topless at the beach is fine and cool, do whatever you like there. I also agree with the poster above who said it feels slightly weird to share a picture of that with people in a work environment.
I think if it were a frontal shot then sure I’d agree. But in this case I think if you draw anything sexual from that image then you are just way too horny and that’s your business and yours alone.
This is exactly the kind of image you would use to market Photoshop, a tool for image makers who are concerned with producing exactly this kind of idyllic, escapist scene.
Ok, I encourage you to use this picture in your email signature at work or use it as your desktop wallpaper and see how far you get in 2024. And I think it is definitely a good thing it is like that now. How do you think women that worked where John Knoll was doing demos felt about the naked woman? Not sexualizing the workplace is better for everyone. Actually kind of dismayed to see HN be so "good ol' boy" on this one. It reminds me again how out of touch and male-dominated it is.
I love the photo, but it's a great photo for private use, not work use. I think you guys aren't paying attention to the HR videos you are supposed to be watching.
I do think John knew exactly what he was doing and that the killer app for Photoshop, computers, and the internet that would come after was sex.
I’m not interested in your hypotheticals when we can just talk about the actual use of the image. Why change the context? At the places I’ve worked it’s been unusual for people to even set a wallpaper and extremely unusual to use some arbitrary image in an email signature (like what??).
Maybe you should ask some women that you know what they would think about this actual scenario (not contrived scenarios), rather than presuming.
Ok...you want a scenario where an image of an attractive young woman was shared and used extensively by members of a male dominated field and where women involved in the field have told us what they think of it?
Oh yeah, I've heard that one before - its Lena/Lenna:
Over the last decade or so journals and professional bodies have been trying to stop people using the Lenna image - Nature essentially banned it in their publications in 2018, and IEEE just this year.
You misunderstand me. I’m saying we have a concrete scenario here, so we should discuss that scenario. Not some other different scenario. The Lenna image was literally taken from a porno mag. Its original context is erotic. I agree that it shouldn’t be used as it has. But that’s not what this thread nor my comments are about. If you want to make it about something else then go ahead but I’m not interested.
wut? ambiguous on what dimension? That's a brick shithouse right there. (how's that slang for you, ESL learners!? it's definitely not an insult, and it's unisex so, not offensive, just means "good build")
No, it means an exceptionally muscular build, which the subject of that photo doesn't have.
Anyway, the comment you're replying to clearly means "a build that leaves the gender ambiguous", not that the dimensions are ambiguous! You don't seem to really be disagreeing with that.
Maybe in some places but north-west UK just means "kinda robust/big/thick" (e.g. could be a bouncer or wrestler) - there's no requirement for "exceptionally muscular". Akin of what kids these days use "absolute unit" for.
(quibbles aside, I agree with you - GP is wrong, not even slightly a "brick shithouse" by any of the definitions)
in the picture she also is muscular, not like a body builder, but like a fit person showing definition (everybody working out or doing yoga was not "a thing" when that picture was taken)
But also, it's just obvious from the words in the phrase. I assume that outside toilets were often just wooden shacks, so a brick one is notable for its robustness. Is that comparible with a beefy labourer's physique? Sure. Is comparible to a curvy, classically feminine body shape? That doesn't make sense.
As the sibling comment to this one says, it doesn't even just apply to people (in fact I'd say it primarily doesn't).
I would expect a lot of viewers to find a kind of subdued eroticism there, but of the kind which is fine and fairly safe-for-work as long as all involved parties consented and the photo is used in a non-erotic context.
For the photographer and the model a photo like this can be sexualized too (but not necessarily).
It seems silly to explicitly deny that a young, seemingly attractive topless woman sitting on the beach in nothing but a bikini bottom wouldn't illicit any sexual response in viewer's brains. Our pattern matching primate brains are essentially hard-wired to detect and respond to biologically suitable mates at a glance. A couple of millennia of civilisation doesn't change that.
I would say that there is nothing remotely offensive or unsuitable in that photo, if considered by itself, instead.
I don't know. This picture was taken on a beach, where people are used to see topless or barely dressed people. Out of curiosity I and my partner have been to nudist beaches and ... once all are equals it becomes a new normality and all kind of erotism from being nude disappear regardless of the attractiveness of people around you.
Same when a woman gets a boob out to feed a baby. No erotic at all unless you are some creep.
I believe it is more the behavior, context and baseline than the actual nudity that triggers us. For instance I wouldn't notice some moderately attractive women in very short skirts and crop top in a danceclub because the club would be full of lightly dressed women. However I would if she is the only one dressed like this in the street while most people have regular pants and a jacket and it would probably trigger something inside that wouldn't in another context.
Also a male teenager might have a different view on this than most adults.
It's the weird irony of things; the more "sheltered" someone grows up, the more the sight of a boob or ankle will be seen as something outrageous. But get a lot of (real life, not porn) exposure to it and the mystery disappears.
This is precisely backward. Our primate brains were accustomed to seeing nude females all the time. The mere appearance of nudity was not enough to inspire a sexual response, context plays a huge role. It’s only in recent human history that we have become so titillated by so little (starting with the Victorian era, but the hypersexualisation of nudity is really the product of the puritanical American culture and advertising practices).
Theres pretty much exactly as much that is sexual about the Lenna image. Its still not appropriate in the workplace or in research. For a start using images like this has obvious and widely negative impacts on women entering your field
Yeah except the Lenna image is from a porno magazine, a photograph of a model styled and posed specifically to create an erotic image. How can you not see a difference here?
I don't find the Lenna image particularly erotic? I guess shes showing her shoulder which might be particularly risqué where you're from? Certainly for me the Jennifer image is at least comparable.
yes, someone smiling over their shoulder front and centre is more erotic to me than someone sitting on the beach with their back to me positioned smaller in the frame.
nudity != pornography. Regardless of your personal opinion of it I don't think Playboy print magazine has ever been considered a porn media, at least not in the society it comes from.
The main issue with Lena photo is that it:
- it is still used everywhere without the consent of the rights owner
- it is still used everywhere without the consent AND MORE IMPORTANTLY regardless of the wishes of the ex model Lena Forsén. She has said several times that she wishes she would have been better compensated for the usage it has had.
I guess that makes a huge difference with that picture used to promote photoshop once. While the video and picture aren't lost, and are occasionally mentioned against as part of computer history, they aren't widely in use as of today against the wishes of the photographer and the subject.
I think your definition of pornography is more narrow than what I understand it to be. Regardless of whether playboy is specially pornography or not, the image was intended to be arousing.
Regardless, the Lenna picture used in the imaging industry doesn't include anything remotely pornographic because it only includes the top part of the original playboy picture. Tops not covering shoulders have been so common in the last 50 years it didn't occur to me it came from a nude photo until I read about its origin.
The feelings & wishes of the model are the most important, but also important is the impact on people (especially women) in the field, as the links I posted earlier point out, this impact is generally quite negative.
It's because at one point, the subject of objectification was raised; films and TV shows having a usually female cast member appear only for eye candy.
But the other part is changing or tightening morals, in part due to a conservative morality police PrOtEcTiNg ThE cHiLdReN, in part due to cold, hard cash - that is, making a movie PG means more people will watch it.
Note that that's not only a US thing; media is multinational, and some countries are stricter when it comes to morality / decency / sexualization.
That said, it's not universal. At the same time, people of many age categories watch porn in public. Some people have no shame about these things. It's confusing times where both inclusion and sexualization / objectification exist in parallel.
Attraction, flirting, and sexuality are all fine and good things in the right environment (e.g. beach in Bora Bora), imo its a bit weird bringing them into a work environment.
What typifies the current era is the new morality police finding reason to tisk-tisk at even the most prosaic things, if they can be first in line to point out a reason something is not PC.
One would have thought the new Victorianism would get dull by now, and there's certainly been some backlash against it, but it seems like a gestalt that won't die easily.
Probably because they can't keep their phone in their pocket and have a need to photograph absolutely everything and share it on whatever popular social network is all the rage these days.
Maybe not in terms of prudeness, but American wokeism, social issues, cultural norms, identity politics and cancel culture are definitely spilling in Europe as well.
Probably due to most large social media platforms and entertainment content being from there, so their rules and social norms get imported here along with the content like the Colorado potato beetle, instead of being adapted to the local market and local culture, the way McDonald's is in France for example.
"Doesn't mean anything" is a shorthand for "not well-defined" and "means completely different things to different people" which makes it a useless word for any serious conversation.
The context I gave should make it clear what it means. The fact that a word might mean different things to different people is no real excuse to avoid a conversation.
How do you propose to have a conversation about whether X is good or bad when one side defines X as "bad things" while the other defines the same word as "good things"?
And although, as Knoll is quick to point out, photos were being altered long ago in Soviet Russia, it was only Photoshop that democratised that ability. In a way Jennifer was the last person to sit on solid ground, gazing out into an infinitely fluid sea of zeros and ones, the last woman to inhabit a world where the camera never lied.
We now live in a world where anything we see, we hear, or speak is never taken on its value any more. You can have a picture of you standing next to Kim Kardashian and everybody will wonder if its actually you standing next to her - or did you manipulate the photo? You can watch a video and we now wonder if what we're seeing is actually real or not.
This photo was the last off ramp to a reality where nothing truly is what it seems anymore. I never thought or could imagine the world I currently reside in.