Monday, September 28, 2020

It is almost impossible for people to pose as reenactors for a photograph. . .

and for it to look right.

They almost never do.  It's really hard to pull off.

All the time, if I hit certain sites, I'll get ads like "surprising historic photos of the West . . ." or something like that.  I don't hit on them, and you can tell even from the ad that the photos are modern photos just by the way the subjects appear.

Likewise, if you go to pinterest you'll get real historic photos, but you'll also get pins that are reeanactors.  It's not really hard to tell which are which.  

Some of this is obvious.  If you hit on a photo of "World War Two infantrymen", black and white and photographed with 100 ASA or not, it still isn't going to look right if the GIs are all about 6' tall, 30 lbs overweight, and middle aged.  Nope. That wasn't the average GI.

Likewise, if the "true photographs of the Old West" ad shows a clean, long haired pouty lipped young woman with her blouse partially unbuttoned, and probably holding a Winchester lever action rifle, that's not depicting how any period woman would be photographed. . . even a young woman who knew how to shoot a lever action and owned one.

But in other instances, it's just something.  Something hard to define.  But you can almost always tell.

You know?

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