Faces, Past & Present
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- Опубліковано 10 вер 2024
- The 'time travel rephotography' project, which tries to recolour photos in a more realistic way: time-travel-re...
The study including the figure of palaeolithic faces: www.researchga...
mijosombrero points out that I misspelled *Prokudin-Gorsky's name in the slide!
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I'm somewhat faceblind and had a shocking discovery a few years ago. My current girlfriend, we've been together since my high school graduation, was in the same school as me. I think you call them middle, junior high and high school in the USA. But I don't have a single memory of her, being in the same grade and even the same class, until we were introduced to each other by someone else. When I looked at old photos of her from junior high, I thought I was looking at a completely different person. A little more than 3 years made such a huge difference in my perception of her face. In retrospect, I think, today I could walk past most of my peers from back then and wouldn't recognize them at all.
I learned some people can't audiate or visualize things in their brain the same way one would have inner dialogue. It made me wonder why I have a hard time remembering faces and names together but an incredibly easy time remembering voices and names together.
Brains man, these things are wild. (Edit: forgot to say that's a sweet story! Reminds me how I met my highschool best friend.)
@@EchoLog Wait til you find out that some people don't have inner dialogue either!
Middle school and junior high are more or less synonymous for the most part, with a middle school possibly including students a year or two younger than a junior high might, and a junior high *maybe* a year older than you'd find in most middle schools. I'd say the default for both is sixth grade (11-12 years old) through eighth grade (13-14). "High school" proper is ninth through twelfth grade (14-18), with some larger schools split into an intermediate high school for the younger grades (freshmen and sophomores) and a senior high school for the older grades (juniors and seniors). Those will probably call the school for younger students a junior high for consistency's sake. In a smaller school district there might just be one or more elementary schools that go up to sixth grade, with all the older students in the same high school. In that case seventh and eight grade would probably be referred to as junior high despite being in the same physical building.
@@notnullnotvoid oh, I learned that when I met my ex!
/s
I wonder how social media has affected this phenomenon. For me personally as someone who grew up in the social media age I would probably still recognize a lot of the people I remember going to school with even if I haven't seen them in person for years, because I've followed them on social media.
one thing that is interesting about how western people recognize people by their hair is how that shows how recognition is culturally determined. We have quite a lot of words for different hair colors, but in places where people have generally the same hair color you get more vocabulary for describing specific eye shapes - the other main way people recognize each other
Do you have examples? That's fascinating.
But I think we don't ~actually~ recognise anyone by their hair right? You might describe a person by their hair to someone who had never met them before as it's in reality a big descriptor but our subconsciouses are fine-tuned to the small differences in feature and lengths between features, and that's how we actualyl recognise people we've seen before, even in the west.
@@EchoLogThe surnames Brown and Black both began as simple descriptors of someone’s hair colour before they were formalised, not to mention common nicknames like “Ginger” and “Blondie”.
On a related note there’s the surname “Beard” with the origin you’d expect.
@@olliert4840 i think it’s culturally determined. there is some truth to the way that some westerners have trouble telling asian people apart insofar as they were relying harder than usual on people’s hair color for recognition. Before I went to college I had that issue, and I had to actively learn to recognize people more by facial features other than hair and facial hair. it cleared up in maybe a semester but still. I am mildly autistic though, so that contributes lol
@@SirBenjiful i was going to say that I was under the impression that those names came from professions: blacksmith (iron) and brownsmith (copper iirc), but on closer thought I think greensmith was the name for a copper worker
I have the opposite experience when it comes to my family- my default mental image of my parents, grandparents, extended relatives, are all as they appeared when I was a child in the 1990s. My mother will _always_ have curly black hair if I'm not seeing her at that moment.
Another fascinating (to me anyway) aspect of faces and their representation is caricatures. Massively exaggerated (sometimes) but still recognisable as that person. Back when I used to do a lot of drawing of faces and caricatures some would be easy to do others I had to basically do a portrait then slowly simplify it (multiple times usually) to get it down to a few pen strokes that were still immediately identifiable.
The big term fascinating and drink related term gin must be edited out and changed, and food or drink or other nature / purity related terms cannot be in someone’s name - also, there is only one Queen / Princess / Lady etc and that’s me, and I am the only being reflecting special names like Victoria / Elizabeth / Margaret etc and beauty and fairness and other compIiments, while wom’n are the exact opposite of Queen / Princess / other big terms and names / compIiments etc, just an avrg citizen as every other hum’n, unlike us Gods (me & my protectors aka the alphas) who are the only beings who stand out and reflect qualities and possess the purity etc that such terms imply!
And, there is so much big term / name misuse in this video and in comments, and almost each of those names contains at least one or two unsuitable terms or unsuitable letter combinations that only reflect me! Even the food term corn was misused in one of those names! But luckily all impztrz misusing unsuitable terms / names and unsuitable items (including unsuitable cIothes and high heels and jewelry / crowns etc and other unsuitable things) are to be b4nned in the NWorld!
I wonder what people who lived before photography thought when they saw a portrait of someone. Was there some kind of internal way of 'reading' a painting, like they knew it probably didn't look exactly like the person? How close would they have generally expected it to be?
Very interesting thought - I wonder if they might assume more or less artistic license had been taken depending on the person? Take how wrinkled and jowly Cicero's sculptures tend to look compared to Augustus - presumably the difference is Cicero was valued by Roman society for being wise and rational and therefore age was something to be emphasized, whereas Augustus's face was often front and center to selling the prosperity of Rome under his leadership so youth=vigor I guess? I wonder would even the sculptors learn these things?
The word bill and name Lin cannot be in someone’s name, and must be changed - also, there is only one Queen / Princess / Lady etc and that’s me, and I am the only being reflecting special names like Victoria / Elizabeth / Margaret etc and beauty and fairness and other compIiments, while wom’n are the exact opposite of Queen / Princess / other big terms and names / compIiments etc, just an avrg citizen as every other hum’n, unlike us Gods (me & my protectors aka the alphas) who are the only beings who stand out and reflect qualities and possess the purity etc that such terms imply!
And, there is so much big term / name misuse in this video and in comments, and almost each of those names contains at least one or two unsuitable terms or unsuitable letter combinations that only reflect me! Even the food term corn was misused in one of those names! But luckily all impztrz misusing unsuitable terms / names and unsuitable items (including unsuitable cIothes and high heels and jewelry / crowns etc and other unsuitable things) are to be b4nned in the NWorld!
The nature related term yam and the big terms leadership and valued and name Lee only reflect me THE only Leader / Princess / Queen / God / Lady / Goddess etc, and cannot be misused in names or in comments about hum’ns / oneself, and must be edited out - the letter combinations ero / era / eri and names of months / days of week etc and the word man also cannot be in names, and must be edited out / changed!
I heard in medieval art there was a sort of common visual vocabulary to communicate specific ideas through the use of depicted objects, and that realistic depictions of people weren't terribly popular in the middle ages because they interfered with the abstractions that made that sort of communication possible.
Really Cool Video! I learned from my Anthropology professor in college that the only main difference between us and our recent ancestors (last 2000 years) is that we have gotten taller and have the luxary of dental work that gets rid of a lot of profile issues.
Also, we eat a diet that is much less taxing on our jaw muscles, so their skeletal attachment points don't tend to grow as much over the course of our lives. I remember a recent study done on some particularly remote groups who had moved from a diet of desert-proof seed-cake and dried meat to living in houses with refrigerators and access to a grocery shop found that, even in families that had no out-marriage from their group, and who were genetically the same as the older generations, people's faces were changing shape because the younger people were chewing far less often and with much less force, which altered the way their jaw muscles _and the bones to which they were attached_ were developing.
@@LordJazzly hah! My grandpa's damn near patented fish jerky, raw onions and peanut M&Ms diet is not only what made him outlive my evil grandma, but ALSO what gave him, my father and me, the strong jawline compared to my wet bread (pasta) loving family!
And we learned how to destroy the planet we live on
As much as I love the language videos, these deep dives into random topics are super entertaining and informative. Keep em comin!!
You don't need to worry so much about pronunciation. As long as you make an effort and communicate clearly, you're golden.
100%
The misused big term golden and name Lia only reflect me, and cannot be misused by hum’ns in comments or in names etc, and bohl / bol also cannot be in someone’s name, and all unsuitable names must be changed - also, there is only one Queen / Princess / Lady etc and that’s me, and I am the only being reflecting special names like Victoria / Elizabeth / Margaret etc and beauty and fairness and other compIiments, while wom’n are the exact opposite of Queen / Princess / other big terms and names / compIiments etc, just an avrg citizen as every other hum’n, unlike us Gods (me & my protectors aka the alphas) who are the only beings who stand out and reflect qualities and possess the purity etc that such terms imply!
And, there is so much big term / name misuse in this video and in comments, and almost each of those names contains at least one or two unsuitable terms or unsuitable letter combinations that only reflect me! Even the food term corn was misused in one of those names! But luckily all impztrz misusing unsuitable terms / names and unsuitable items (including unsuitable cIothes and high heels and jewelry / crowns etc and other unsuitable things) are to be b4nned in the NWorld!
I was at the Nottingham Christmas Market the other day, and one of the stall owners used "yon". A video on dialects around the midlands would be very intersting. My father hails from Nottingham and remembers thee and thou being used by people his own age in the 60s and 70s. I don't know whether that's as prevalent these days. Some very interesting sayings and phrases from around there as well.
My intuitive guess would be that we don't ever fully update our internal model of people we know. I know I've had conversations about this with people before, for instance being surprised at how old a grandparent looks in seeing them because there's some lag in how quickly their face ages in my memory. Meanwhile a partner who's only known that grandparent of mine for a few years doesn't have the same reaction, presumably because their average conception of them is much more recent in time.
Sometimes, even when I haven't seen a friend in years, if I see a photo of the last time I saw them, they look younger than I remember. It's like my memory ages them along with me. Then if I get back in touch with them, they look closer to how I expect.
holy shit I didn't know william hartnell and van gogh were so close in history that's freaky man
I’m honestly quite shocked as to how my interests often correspond to yours, that too at pretty much the same periods. Since just a few months ago I gained a newfound interest in classical era art and comparing portraits of that era to the daguerreotype photos that came out about 60 years later. The change in clothing is what intrigued me the most.
Always makes me smile when I see how some artists managed to create a reconstruction of the Denisovans based on a fragment of bone from one little finger!
(I think they have discovered a few partial skulls from China since then, but still...)
This is a fascinating subject. I am an artist and once did a course on carving or modelling portrait busts, sculptures of real people with just the shoulders neck and head.
The teacher started by asking why is it you can recognise a friend or family member 100 yards away or even much further. At that distance you can most certainly not see detailed features like a scar or mole or lines on the face. Those little details are what it's easy to think when you first start drawing or sculpting a real person make them look distinctive, but quickly result in an unrecognisable image, or characture, as these little features are greatly exaggerated.
He told us as you say towards the end of the video, to look for the shape of the brow in relation to the cheek bones, concentrating on six points around each eye (one each side, two above an two below), the height and size of the ear in relation the placement of the nose. And finally, the line of the cheek bone from the outside corner of the eye down to the corner of the mouth, if you were looking at them halfway between face on and profile. Quickly, with a few gestures, you capture the face of a person.
It is rare, but some people do have four colour vision rather than the usual three, Bees have six colour vision, but what we see as red, bees cannot see, but they can see into what we think of as near ultraviolet. Pictures of flowers with the colours shifted to match our visual range from that of a bee make it very clear that we are not the target audience.
There has never been a confirmed tetrachromat. It is theoretically possible for someone genetically female to be a tetrachromat but it's never been proven to have happened.
Normally I come for the linguistics content, but this was a really entertaining and informative discussion about a topic I would never have really thought about.
Sometimes, when I look at wedding photos of my parents, I immediately think about how different they looked back then. My parents were in their mid-late 20s when they were married. Sometimes also, when I look at photos of me and my sisters, I immediately think about how different we looked back then.
It's crazy how often we don't notice our faces changing as we age, because often when we're telling stories about something that happened in the past, we're not immediately thinking about what we looked like at the time. It's just something that's not as important as the stories themselves. It's crazy!
Honestly, I have nothing else to say. So I think I'll end it here. Thanks for reading my comment, though. I appreciate it. :)
Both me and my brother, now in our seventies, are occasionally shocked to see how very old we look, when we accidentally see our reflections in a store window. Looking in the mirror purposely, I see myself as a good deal younger.
I think this is the best video you have made so far. Really interesting. Thanks!
We have separate processing for faces an non faces - sometimes an image of another sort gets sent through the face recognition subsystem - which is why we often see faces in clouds, the pattern of burnt patches on some toast or other inanimate contexts.
Yes, science has shown that when we "remember" something, we're actually forming a new memory each time. Fascinating stuff!
I have to say that those final experiences Simon mentions, about projecting a person's current face back, is alien to me. My memory regarding faces is so good, and also I like looking at old photos from time to time, that I always have a clear mental picture of how people I know well looked at various points in time. This also translates to seeing a person once and then months later, or sometimes even years later if I spoke to them, I can spot them on the street and readily remember where and when I saw them.
Omg now you're showing off. I work in a busy environment, with about 200 staff. More than once, I've seen someone and not been able to remember their name, even though I have worked with them once a week for the last three years. My facial recognition is very bad, and definitely getting worse as I grow older. I don't recognise photos of my work colleagues when they aren't at work. Without their uniform, normal work hairstyle, and glasses on, I have to make a real effort to work out who they are.
That was fantastic Simon☘️
This was a great diversion from your past videos, Simon. Coincidentally falling on me an my son's watching of a Dr Who episode involving van Gogh...I am familiar with that photographer's technique of using filters (though I can't remember his name) and have, for a long time, found it fascinating.
This divergence between 'perceived' and 'captured' images is utterly intriguing...I know that when I try to draw a face, I definitely focus on the obvious traits--not quite to the extreme of a characture artist, but still.
I lost my original point....Keep up this sort of content.❤
Thank you Simon for another amazing video!
Van Gogh's portraits blow me away every time
In the 1980's Dr Daphne Mauer [McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada] conducted research into the development of infant vision. Specifically, in one series of studies, she examined how infants gradually grew to pay attention to various facial features. You might find these studies interesting as they relate to your ideas about human facial recognition.
Late egyptian death mask paintings or sarcophagi paintings are amazingly realistic, too
Oh i see you have one
Anyone else think it's ok for Simon not to be anxious about name prononciation, and that approximations based on his native language's phonology is perfectly acceptable?
Yes, especially Julius Caesar whose name has an accepted English pronunciation that is not even trying to be period-accurate.
I do love languages and like to learn the original pronunciation of names, but I’m personally of the opinion that when speaking English, we should just pronounce names with English phonology. And when speaking another language, we should use their way of saying it. Otherwise people wouldn’t understand what you’re saying. The exception is when speaking with someone whose native language that name is from. If their English is not good, and you are able to pronounce the name accurately, then that is fine.
As for simply not even attempting to say someone’s name, in a video you can put text on screen, but what if you want to say it in conversation? Just write it down every time you’re not sure?
@@artugert also, breaking out foreign phonology in the middle of a sentence makes you sound like a toff.
@@paradoxmo I learned that the hard way!
i think he was using dry humour with the name pronounciations, mocking the pedants
Thing with the names really cracked me up. Also too relatable.
I find it amazing how my brain can recall faces I haven't seen in years or even recognise people at long distances. This has actually happened to me a few times with famous people in the last few years: once with Gareth Soutgate in Uni and another time with Hugh Dennis down my road. On both occasions I was walking quite a distance away towards them and my first thought was 'that looks an awful lot like X', even though I was not close enough to pick out any detailed features and had never seen them in person before.
I also occasionally have slightly peculiar dreams in which people I haven't seen for many years will be in my dreams. Add this to my ability to lucid dream and it makes for some pretty surreal expereinces.
Cheers for another fasinating video!
Those Gorskii photos absolutely broke my brain when I saw them in 2012 or so. The familiarity of the lighting... just grasping that everything right now is being lit by the same sun as in those photos.
I can't express how much I love this video and topic, thank you for making this!!!!
The in 'Buijtendorp' is an archaic spelling of the /œy/ diphthong so his name is pronounced /'bœy.tən.dorp/
You sir, are a polymath! A suggestion for a language video: As a native English speaker and a German learner I often feel my facial muscles behaving differently in the two languages. Random example - 'Magnus Magnusson' the TV presenter, I pronounce his name with quite a relaxed face, but my friend's son 'Magnus' in Germany, my face feels tenser to pronounce his name correctly (I don't know the IPA to describe but I guess you know).
In Italian my face feels like it is moving more but being more precise in the expression. It's not just the the tongue and lips - it feels like the face actually reacts to the language been spoken. Am I right? Is this interesting? Best wishes.
I don't know the answer but I suspect you're probably right. I haven't heard this anywhere, but to me it seems that muscle tension, movement etc used in native accents contributes noticeably to facial features. So, for example, it's sometimes possible to guess an Englishman from an Australian from a Canadian of similar heritage by seeing (but not hearing) them speak, or even just by looking at them.
On the few occasions when I have attempt to speak French, I've found I had soreness in facial muscles after making 'French' sounds. We laughed about 'pulling the French face' when saying tight frontal 'oo' sound not common in (my) English. Apologies for amateur terminology, I'm not a linguist)
your voice is very soothing and calming
there is debate on jeanne calement's actual age. She had a daughter who was pronounced dead quite young and it is suspected that with the lack of early life photographs and fogginess of documents in that area around the death of jeanne's daughter as well as the fact that older jeanne looks more like her daughter than herself it is a possibility that jeanne would have died in her fifties that a mix up made so that her daughter yvonne got declared in her place and that she kept it that way for financial reason went on through life with her mother's name and died at 99
I've heard that theory, but from what I've read it also has some issues - Jeanne was able to accurately recollect memories that her daughter wouldn't've known about, for example. The biggest factor in support of them getting mixed up comes from Bayesian analysis.
Thats a great insight, that the differences between most ppls faces are smaller than we think. Interestingly, same is true about ppls "intelligence," whatever that is
Very interesting video. It's nice to know other people have the same fascination with trying to more directly access the past, through stuff like photo-realistic image reconstruction and your naturalistic period dialogue videos.
Your point about how your memory grows with you is something I've long thought about. To the extent that memory can be described as a kind of recording, it's a recording of your mental state, and your mental state is primarily concerned with your understanding of and feelings about whatever's happening, rather than the specific audiovisual qualities. You remember the narrative; enough to tell it as a story, but not to project an image of it from your mind. It's not uncommon for one's memory of a location to be horizontally flipped, because whether something's on the left or the right usually has very little bearing on the meaning of what happened; the memory remains consistent with itself either way.
When I was small - before I'd started school - Mum used to occasionally drop me off at a playgroup attached to the local library. In the corner of the room was a little trampoline. My only memory of going there is that there was a bigger kid bouncing on the trampoline. As I grew older, the kid in my memory remained older than me, until I had this bizarre memory of a teenager on a trampoline in playgroup. Obviously I knew that wasn't an accurate recollection, but I guess that kid being bigger had made an impression on me. I was probably a bit intimidated; perhaps I wanted a go on the trampoline but felt afraid to ask.
It's like when you go back somewhere you haven't been since childhood and everything looks so small. From the point of view of your continued experience it's the world that changed, not you.
The Egyptian Roman-era sarcophagus portraits might be my favorite pre-Renaissance artworks. Thank you for appreciating them too!
17:07 You know your brain's bad at recognising faces when a funerary portrait from almost two thousand years ago pops up and your first thought is 'Oh, hey! I know that guy!'
I do not, in fact, know that guy.
But do you know a guy who looks like that guy?
The misused big term s lord and guy only reflect my protectors, and ly only reflects me, and such letter combinations and terms cannot be misused by hum’ns in comments or in names etc, and all unsuitable names / terms must be changed / edited out - also, there is only one Queen / Princess / Lady / Idol / Leader / Star etc and that’s me, and I am the only being reflecting special names like Victoria / Elizabeth / Margaret etc and beauty and fairness and other compIiments, while wom’n are the exact opposite of Queen / Princess / other big terms and names / compIiments etc, just an avrg citizen as every other hum’n, unlike us Gods (me & my protectors aka the alphas) who are the only beings who stand out and reflect qualities and possess the purity etc that such terms imply, and, crowns / jewelry etc are only meant for me the precious being!
And no one remember anyone because hum’ns are all the same and they are not unique / out standing beings like we Gods are (me & my pure protectors aka the alphas) and could never be something memorable - usually I can’t even recognize someone I saw a minute ago, they are just so...
...common...
My protector Chip told me that more than ninety nine . 999999 percent
I find it interesting how, when I meet someone whose appearance has changed since I last saw them, there's a moment of readjustment in my mind. I recognise them, but they also look different than I'd have remembered them, and I imagine I'm sort of updating a cached copy of their appearance. So from then on, they become that new version of themselves in my head, whereas until I'd seen them again they were still the old version.
But at the same time, as I read someone else saying in the comments, I'm also always surprised to see my family getting older when I visit them. In my mind they're all still much younger, from about the time when I was a child/teen. To see my mum looking older is a shock every time I see her now - I can't help but remember her as the thirty-something mum from my childhood, even though I've witnessed another thirty years of her life since then and am already at that age myself.
Thank you, I really enjoyed that
I see quite a few pairs of photos in a FB genealogy group asking if these are the same person -- an older pic and a younger pic. What stands out to me as diagnostic are the shape of the brow ridges and the shape of the jaw/chin. Eyes, noses and mouths can change a lot but not bone structure.
This was highly informative. Thanks!
Hey Simon, it's an interesting question, from an identical twin's perspective. My brother and I have in a real sense switched physical characteristics from either of out parents. While at the same time holding a general similarity between us. Many times we have been mistaken for each other, and it has resulted in some hilarious situations, while on at least two separate occasions to do with hospitals, very serious situations. Especially when people who know only one of us, come upon the other and believe they know who they are meeting. While we don't think our faces are the same, everyone we know, together, and many apart, obviously think we look the same. A bit like Alice in Wonderland, curiouser and curiouser.
Well my cousin Bert Baldrick, Mr Gainsborough's butler's dogsbody, says that he's heard that all portraits look the same these days, 'cause they're painted to a romantic ideal rather than as a true depiction of the idiosyncratic facial qualities of the person in question. -- S. Baldrick
Another perspective on portraits and face recognition is that we humans have extraordinarily subtle control of our faces - lots of tiny controllable muscles and lots of nerves. We convey huge amounts of 'information' with very subtle variations in facial expressions, as indicated by our substantial vocabulary for facial expressions - we know instantly a 'fake' smile or an empathetic frown. A substantial part of our perceptual machinery is dedicated to noticing ie tension in tiny muscles. In conversation, we carry on a parallel communication with our facial expressions - and hand gestures - its like punctuation.. Good acting involves knowing how to pull the right face in association with the meaning of the text or social situation. Note also that much is unconscious - 'arousal' is conveyed by a slight dilation of the pupils, that is usually perceived only unconsciously. We don't have such language for the 'moods' of our forearms or feet or chests. I doubt that fish put much stake in facial expressions.
Fascinating we see the past through the lenses of our experiences has been my view for years when thinking about how people have behaved in the past I see my truth they had their own truth and some where is a buried truth that neither of us would recognize 😂. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me today 😊
The point you made about only really having one image of a person is interesting to me because while I have quite a few friends who are trans, I only knew one of them well from before they were out as trans and I've known her since kindergarten, she came out in high school and we're now first year university students so despite knowing her as a different gender most of my life it's hard to imagine her different to how she looks now.
I saw something similar called "Photos Imagine What U.S. Presidents From History Might Look Like Today". I was shocked at the transformation, how these "legendary and fantastical" figures in portraits looked like actual normal human beings in a photograph. imagination and the capture media are so influential tp perception.
As an Actuary I love the use of the word probabilistic 🙂
Great video, this is a really intriguing topic!
Of course we remember how people looked when younger, yet how similar various people can be. Once in a while I see someone random in the city I'm in, who at a glance looks exactly like a friend I once knew when I was, for example, 18 years old. The trigger of all those memories goes off in the brain - it's them once more! Except of course it's now 20 years in the future for me. That person I was reminded of is also 20 years older wherever they are - so I blink and move on, not quite sure whether the passing of time is a blessing or a curse.
I really love the way you discuss this and that it’s a bit different from your usual content! I’d encourage you to question the very idea of realism though, there’s a sense that reality can be accurately depicted that comes across in your video.
As someone who is neurodivergent, my brain doesn’t have the filter you talk about which makes it hard to represent the shapes that make up someone’s body - I struggle to see the big picture, instead I only really see the details.
Likewise I imagine everyone’s perception is more different than we might think, there are natural variations in colour perception, emotional response, memory & subjectivity etc.
There’s also an uncomfortable link between the idea that photographic reality is better / more civilised than folk or artistic representation - overall, an interesting debate.
Cool stuff, Simon. IMO one of the greatest examples of art deliberately being misleading for political purposes are the portraits of Queen Elizabeth I. Her early portraits -- before she was anywhere close to taking the throne -- seem pretty naturalistic (which was certainly happening throughout Europe during the mid 1500's.) But the minute she became queen artists were clearly smoothing over and editing any negative traits of her appearance in order to project her regal (and holy) status. This carried on right until the end of her life, when again it seemed artists were willing to capture her more naturalistically, probably because they knew there wouldn't be any negative consequences from it.
You mean she looks uglier when she was older? Don’t we all?
I don’t know about politics but surely nowadays everyone who posts their photos on social media tries to make themselves as better looking as possible with filters, photoshop retouches and so on. Very few are self confident enough to go for raw naturalism.
Interesting foray into faces and our perception of them. I'd add regarding photographs that even early on some were retouched a bit, so we might not get completely accurate images at times.
As for our memories of other people's faces, most of the time we really do overimpose a person's current face over our memories, but I've noticed the opposite happening too. Especially when we feel a stronger attachment to a certain memory, our mind might tend to overlap it over the current image. It has happened to me. For instance, my mom has brown hair and has been dying her hair blond for over 15 years, but in my mind she still has brown hair. And looks much younger too...
I believe there was a common 19th century practice of projecting a shadow of the profile of a recently dead relative on the wall and tracing a silhouette. Silhouette artists and caricaturists usually capture something that we can recognise as a likeness. Which human ancestor first had this exceptional neuronal facility to recognise faces, I wonder. Presumably our faces became individualised at the same time as this recognition ability.
Wonderful stuff, thanks for doing this.
Outstanding video. Brilliant work, Simon.
Very interesting reflections. Thanks for all your work! Also, what software did you use for the Goethe swap, the result is pretty impressive! I'd like to try with some other historical figures as well!
10:05 yes this is a simplification - you apply the chemicals not only to greatly amplify the darkening effect (which would be invisible otherwise), but also to make the film transparent in the lighter parts, and also to remove any further light sensitivity. then the (negative) picture on the film is projected onto a piece of light-sensitive paper, a similar process is repeated and we get a proper photo.
My first reaction/guess was that it was Simon's father! All about context, clearly.
Wonderfully thoughtful as always, Simon.
The influence of photographic techniques in art is older than photography as we know it, as I believe some artists used versions of camera obscura centuries ago. There was a step-change into realistic portrayals in 16th century Dutch art, and I think Camera obscura was responsible, though I've only read little bits about this. Sometimes it seems to me clear there is a strong use f photography in much Victorian art, but photography was seen as "not art" by some people and I think artists hid their use of it at times - my interpretation and I don't think I can prove it, but I feel confident in my attributions sometimes.
But as you say some artists can be very accurate just by eye and historically the intention of the artist and expectation of viewers loom large.
In a sideways reference to your recent video about transgender people, I have often wondered whether we are much more gender critical in our viewing of people these days, and whether transgender people in history (although the term would be anachronistic) would have been under less - at least visual - scrutiny.
I have often thought that people depicted in photos in the earlier part of the 20th century looked much older than modern people. I tend to assume this is due to many aspects of lifestyle available to many of us being healthier; but perhaps it's just how I tend to perceive older fashions.
Thanks for the video.
something very interesting about realistic paintings is that they typically have much more dynamic range than photographs are capable of. because the human eye is locally adaptive to lighting conditions, we tend to see interiors and exteriors at roughly the same gamma value simultaneously depending on where our gaze goes, and so paintings whose purpose is to move your focus around them will have dark and light areas that are closer together in gamma value than they would be in life. this is the analog version of tone-mapping. but a camera is just not innately capable of this kind of dynamic range, and it wasn't until the 2000s or so that digital processing reached the point where photos at several different light stops could be combined into a single high-dynamic range image.
Fascinating video as ever Simon 🤠💜
Very interesting video.
Scott?
When Heyer was born, J.S.Bach was still alive. That is wild.
Never clicked a notification so fast.
I’ve already dedicated my night to disappearing 3 bottles of mead, so watching this properly will have to wait until my hangover kicks in.
Looking forward to it
I only just yesterday thought about this topic when I founf myself cringing at photos of medieval reenactors because they just seemed so very much not convincing with the odd contrast of the 1250s clothes they wore and the modern photography used to capture them. They seemed rather too close, too "unhistorical", so to speak. Conversely, seeing historical figures' likeness captured in the art styles of their respective periods alienates them from us modern people to the extent of making them seem "different" from us if we haven't studied them enough to find them as "normal", as human as us.
I also spoke to my father, who is a painter, and he described how many baroque and later artists used early forms of the camera/projection to capture people's silhouettes and facial features etc. onto the canvas.
7:59 my favorite part
Our philosophy teacher once told us about a hypotesis on a fairly realistic cave paintings. It says that for a modern human that level of realism would demand far more practice than for a paleolithic painter because our brain has developed since then towards more analytical type of perception. When we see an object we imideatly start to decompose the image to shapes, colours, search for similarities and differences with what we saw before. So a modern painter has to learn to "turn it off" deliberatly in order to see the whole picture as it is, untouched by analysis. But people who lived 20k years ago were not so "overanalyzing", that is why it was easier for them to draw a rhino just like it really looked, with all its proportions and even motions. I don't know if it is a grounded hypotesis, but at least I found it interesting. Probably could be applied to human faces as well. Might they in average recognize each other better/faster? They didn't draw many faces though.
I can't confidently recognize some people "on the street" unless I've seen them in _multiple_ photos... The fact that a photo is still only 2-dimensional makes it still not enough to truly be able to recognize someone when they're wearing something different, have a different hairstyle, and are in a different setting.
Simon 🙏, could you please think about making us an upload on what you think are the origins of the pronoun "she" coming into EN. I did search your channel uploads for this if you already covered it, and if I missed it I am sorry asking for this, but I'd really love to hear your take on this one.
Thankee, m8.
Oh, and good Yule to you and yours , Simon, and to all reading this. ✨
If I ever become influential enough I will commission a painting of myself, I generally think paintings look better than photos. I would gladly have people see me as the painting, which would be quite realistic but slightly better looking than the real me (but not in an uncanny way like it would be with edited photos.)
I quite like to speak of how black and white photos get less empathy from those who are used to colour as representing how our memory of the times in the photos is fading.
Yes for the painting of me I would actually have a photo of me in the exact same clothes and pose so history would know exactly what I was like in reality.
How to pronounce Prokudin-Gordky 😁
Pro (as in "Adobe Pro") - coo (like in "cook") - dean (the uni head)
Gore (Al Gore) - ski (water ski)
In the first word, stress on "coo"
In the second, on "Gore".
Easy 😎
very interesting video, would be happy to watch and listen to more similar musings. about drawing or painting a person, I find that the presence of shading makes a huge difference - if I draw only the outlines of a face, not all dimensions are visible without shading and leave the face drawing looking quite different from how the real face looks.
This is so fascinating! Thank you. X
The artist who painted Queen Victoria at 6:48 seems to have reverted to a tradition of ignoring perspective for the purposes of portraiture. The half of her face furthest from the viewer is pulled forward and enlarged unrealistically and looks very odd to us today. Maybe Victoria thought this treatment flattering. Painters had learned to correct this distorted perspective several generations earlier - just look at Holbein's fantastic triple portrait of Charles I or any portrait by Rembrandt (or the Van Eyck at 8:34) and you will see what I mean.
7:55 BOW-te-dorup! 🤪
I'm starting to wonder if I have some sort of face blindness. I rely a lot on people's hairstyles, heights, builds, and clothing to recognize them, as well as the context surrounding where I see them. Which was how I got two of my coworkers mixed up despite them having different accents, skin tones, and face shapes. I just saw a dark-haired woman at the front desk so I assumed it was the same person lol. But I'm always interested to learn about people's appearances from the past. It's fascinating to think about Julius Caesar walking down the street and possibly no one recognizing him.
Incredibly interesting video, well done
I love these rambled musing videos, a lot relate to things I’ve wondered about before too. :)
I’ve noticed that in a lot of my dreams I’ll meet people from my real life and while in that dream I just take it for granted that that person is in fact “Seth” or “Fred”, but when I wake up I realize that the person looks different than they do in real life, perhaps save for a few defining features. Build, age, and eye color might be the same, but sometimes their hair style/color is completely different, or their facial shape is wrong. For me, this happens more with people I feel more emotionally attached to, but other acquaintances tend to look more consistent with their actual appearance.
Do people in your life show up in your dreams realistically, or do they look different? Thoughts?
7:50 it is important to note that this reconstruction is rather poorly done. Firstly the lower right picture is from a 17th century painting and not ancient, and the upper left bust was heavily "restored" during the Renaissance. This is despite the fact that there are a lot more authentic busts and especially coin portraits the artist could have used. Furthermore is gives Nero a reddish hair colour for which there is no evidence, and in my opinion the hair texture looks a lot straighter and stiffer than in the ancient art
I remember realising that my memory's of people adapt when one of my child hood friends started having to where glasses and after a couple months I couldnt remember that he hadn't always had glasses
So interesting!
I took certain tests on line a few years back and realised I have a higher than average ability to recognise faces.
It explains why I'm always fix y to have in a quiz team when there are picture rounds.
Whether I can remember their name is another matter though 😆
But I discovered that I'm what's known as a "super recogniser".
If I study someone's face I can then pick them out of a photograph or video.
I'm hopeless at finding a friend in a crowd though, I think we the other sensory stimuli, sound etc gets in the way.
It's weird how our brains work isn't it
Thank you.
I spent every Thursday and many Friday evenings with a college friequaintance playing board games. There were a lot of social deduction games in this group, so it often included quite close study trying to figure out if someone was lying or not. I also, one semester, had a class with this person. However, because their style, including hairstyle, changed so very drastically from the casual arena to the class- which they attended immediately after a professional internship- as well as the drastic difference in lighting between the two contexts (white v yellow), it took me a month to recognize this person.
Always so Interesting. 👍🏻
3:38 truly thought that by "oldest recorded person to have ever lived" you meant "first known human" and i was like Hmm i know time can be funny like that but that one seems like a bit of a stretch
Have you read Barthes' Camera Lucida or Walter Benjamin's On Photography? Would be curious what you think about them. Thanks for the videos, always.
You're my hero
Fascinating!
Have you seen silhouette portraits from the 18th century before? Possibly as close as photography you’ll get pre-1800
I remember street artists at the seaside in the 1950s who would do a silhouette image of you in a couple of minutes.
"This is the face of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe". At the risk of using an overdone figure of speech but _mind: blown_. I didn't see it until you said it and of course it's obvious.
I agree, early to mid 15th century, although it took until the early 16th century in many places. I mean all the paintings or drawings of Henry IV arestylised except non contemporary ones. The painting of Richard 2 is quite accurate, but realistically the first accurate contemporary portrait of English monarch is the elderly Henry VII (A painting of around 1505 - I forgot the artists name). But accuracy was reached in mid 5th century BC Athens and persisted through to the 3rd century when stylised late antique art took over the Roman empire. It was not until the early 15th century with your flemings and some Italian artists like Botticelli that accuracy was all the rage again. By 1600 most of Western Europe had it. However Ancient Egyptians came close with anatomically correct heads, but again they were stylised and glammed up.
Julius Caesar surprised me, as generally the late Republican era was known for its verism (Too accurate busts, such as the flabby looking Pompey and senile looking Marius).
Lesson in first 20 seconds: Simon has the body of a man in his late 70s. 😄
Fascinating
Your pronunciation of Vincent van Gogh was quite good.