This question is hard to explain – so bear with me. What is it about antique objects or photos that makes them instantly recognizable as antique. For example I’m walking down the street and see a car like none I’ve ever seen before. I think, wow what a cool antique car. What is it that distinguishes this car as old and something I’ve never seen before as opposed to new (like a concept car) and also new to my experience. I hope I’ve made the question clear. Another example is old photographs, like the class photos taken back in the 20s or 30s. They seem to have a quality to them that is impossible to duplicate even if a professional photographer were trying.
Does anyone else get this sense about antique things? Or am I just failing to consider contextual clues that lead us to think “this must be old.”
Believe it or not, no mind altering substances were used in forming the concept for this post.
I know what you mean.
In the class photos, it might be little details like the cut of clothing, the style of collars, the haircuts etc.
One of the best ways to determine exactly what those little cues are is to watch a TV show or movie that is set in that era and work out why it doesn’t feel authentic.
“Through a glass, darkly…” The past is, by the way our memories work, faded. This is why movies often use b&w or sepia for flashbacks: it more closely matches the way our minds present the memories to us.
Otherwise:
Style. Beaver coats, pageboy bobs, candlestick telephones, etc.
Materials: Bakelite. (I love that word!)
Behavior: Look at groups of frontiersmen in photos from the Old West. They sit stock still and glower. Today, we smile for cameras.
Language: Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t write the Sherlock Holmes stories in that fashion just to call attention to himself… And, oh, how much we’ve lost since the days of Abraham Lincoln! (“The mighty father of waters again runs unvexed to the sea.”)
Patina: Hang around an antiques store and notice the physical signs of age: rust, dings and dents, corrosion, the dirt from a thousand handlings. This is also a side-effect of materials, as modern chattels tend to be slightly more impact-resistant.
And, finally, Provenance. There isn’t much difference between, say, a dagger that’s five years old and one that’s 1500 years old. If they’re both shined and oiled and fitted with an ivory hilt, it might require the services of a physics lab to tell them apart. But if I tell you, with evidence to back it up, “This dagger was carried by a soldier in Justinian’s army,” it suddenly looks very old indeed!
Somehow, I think there’s something about the face - I have seen many period photos, and generally everyone seems in place, except once in a while a face pops out that seems quite contemporary. I don’t know why, and I realise that while hair-styles, clothes, yes - even makeup, change over the decades, human faces really haven’t, but still this phenomenon seems to occur for me (one except that quickly comes to mind is a picture of union leaders getting beat up at a Ford plant in the 1930s, one of the guys had a very ‘modern’ “not of the 1930s” face).
I thought this was something only I imagined, except a number of years ago I was reading a Star Trek novel (yeah, well), where Kirk was in a hall looking at a series of portraits and saw a picture of a person who “was out of his time” (in the context I talk about above, not in a standard time-travel way).
Interesting, SirRay–I know what you mean. The other day I saw a photo of a mid-Victorian woman who would have looked right at home in a modern business haircut, and it was surprising to me. I suppose people aged more quickly back then, spent more time outdoors, had bad teeth, and worried about different things. I’ve often thought nutrition must change facial structure as well; have you ever noticed that in old photographs, women seem to have weak or receding chins more of the time than they do now? (Maybe it’s just me.) I’ve wondered if it has to do with the generally worse health and nutrition they had.
The older I get, the more faces in old photographs do look contemporary. I think I used to get caught up in the patina, the hairstyle, and the accessaries, but somewhere I learned to look at the actual person.
SirRay, Dangermom, I think you guys are on to something. Even ignoring (or at least trying to ignore) the differences in hairstyle etc., there is something just different in their eyes.
Does anyone know if there are any photographic artists that try to ‘fake’ old photos. Not the amusement park gunslinger/saloon photos but something more serious. I’m betting it would be impossible to do because of that ‘difference’ we are talking about.
Also, any comments on antique objects? Because it seems to me that even when you see an antique ‘out of context’ – not in a antique shop or where you know what you’re looking at is old, an even if it has been cleaned or restored so no standard signs of age exist – that it still seems obviously old.
With cars it can often be the sheet metal. Certain shapes are easier to stamp, or are stiff enough without requiring reinforcement. Newer stuff has lots of plastic that has shape determined by styling or aerodynamics.
I have motorcycle made in Russia in 2002. It has very little plastic. People assume it is an antique.
I could tell it was old by the very look of it. Still, it’s an interesting question. Kind of surprised it died so quickly. I know exactly what the OP is saying. I think it was the photographic equipment used in the past, and the materials used. They give old photographs, movies, etc, a sort of feel that seems difficult to duplicate. Hell, why would anyone want to duplicate it today when it was such a pain in the ass the way they used to do it?
As for cars, I think it’s just the styling choices and materials. Even when designers today try and make a retro version of a car they put in embellishments that show the car is modern. There was an episode of Fantomworks on Velocity where they were building an old Studebaker truck, but you could tell when they were done that it was modern, even though they used all steel and a lot of the original parts (it was a resto-mod).
In photos, women’s eyebrows are often evidence of which decade they’re in. And in period movies and tv shows, it’s very common to compromise a period haircut with the period in which it was filmed.
One odd thing about old photos is that they were created with lenses that often had very short depth of field. With a modern lens, if you take a photo of an object with a good general lens and the object is, say, 15 feet away, then although the point at exactly 15 ft will be in perfect focus, so will stuff a little bit closer and a little bit further away. The range of distances from the camera that are in focus, which might be 14 ft to 16 feet, is called the depth of field.
But looking at old photos of Civil War generals and the like, you can see that the lenses of the day had very narrow DoF. The general’s glasses might be in focus, but the tip of the nose is not, nor is the ear.
I never noticed that, but if true, it’s not the lenses that are different. The depth of field of old lenses is exactly the same as modern ones of the same focal length, due to physics. The controlling factor is the aperture – a large aperture (low F-stop) creates a shallow depth of field; a pinhole creates an almost infinite depth of field.
The films/plates in use long ago were relatively insensitive to light, requiring a small F-stop to properly be exposed, or a long exposure, which caused blurring if people couldn’t hold still long enough. It’s possible you observed this kind of motion blur, although I don’t see how the general’s ear could be moving if his glasses did not!
Regarding printed materials, posters/ads/etc., and objects with writing on them, the fonts and the styles of graphic design can be very dating (and can be used to date the object).
For example, look at this and this and guess when they were made.
