Tintypes are like polaroids and can't be manipulated.
Silver gelatin prints on the other hand are a different story and since it's the early 1900's they'd be silver gelatin prints.

The Stealth Hippopotamus: wow. that either one of the greatest headlines ever or complete....

I don't know what to call it.

I'm inclined to go with the former. Bravo, subby.

The right wants you to think those photos were manipulated because they don't want you to know that veggies, chickens and rabbits were that big before man-made climate changes.

If the line in its mouth didn't look so bad, I'd have doubts about this one.
I could believe muskies topped 100 lbs. a century ago.

talkertopc: The right wants you to think those photos were manipulated because they don't want you to know that veggies, chickens and rabbits were that big before man-made climate changes. corporate farm interests downsized everything so they could machine process it.

FTFY

That reminds me I have some cyanide in the basement for photo retouching. I need to get rid of that someday. (I also have some unexposed glass plates, but I'll keep those.)

Metaluna Mutant: [1.bp.blogspot.com image 301x400]

Ah yes. The Joe Stalin School of Photojournalism.

Headline had me giggling for two minutes. Well done, subby.

Post marked Jan. 26, 1906

Rich Cream: Post marked Jan. 26, 1906 1909

For posterity.

And then in 1932 all the little people died from an unknown disease leaving us with only these postcards to remember them by.

Huh. Melon party.

talkertopc: The right wants you to think those photos were manipulated because they don't want you to know that veggies, chickens and rabbits were that big before man-made climate changes.

Colour_out_of_Space: [www.wired.com image 600x377]
If the line in its mouth didn't look so bad, I'd have doubts about this one.
I could believe muskies topped 100 lbs. a century ago.

high contrast and a bad scan. That's most likely completely legit.

I'd just like to day that this is HOTY material, if only for 'jiggery-pokery'. The rest is just icing on the made-from-scratch cake. A golf clap to you, good mitter

Oh, you scamps.

"photomontage postcard entitled 'Melon Party.' "

Thankfully, the gilded age version of Lemon Party is not up to modern expectations.

Capital headline is capital, I say.

red5ish: Hence the term "cut and paste".

"Cut and paste" actually derives from the more pedestrian method of how *text* editing was done for many years, not to photo manipulation -- though the phrase would obviously find its way there, just not *from* there. The original Jefferson Bible is an example of early cut-and-paste editing, and it well predates photography. Cut-and-paste editing continued right up to just a few decades ago, and most educated people over 60 have probably even done it, since it was common practice in colleges up through at least the 1960s. My father tells me that the transition was gradual and inconsistent, and that readily available word processing was not common until the late 1970s.

Vlad_the_Inaner: [www.wired.com image 600x459]

"photomontage postcard entitled 'Melon Party.' "

Thankfully, the gilded age version of Lemon Party is not up to modern expectations.

The headline on that one is disappointing. The postcard clearly says "without melon," yet the writer wonders if the 'object' is meant to suggest a slice of watermelon. Because he's apparently never seen a flat bean. The image isn't even a phototouch, just a photo of some kids holding a good-looking fake flat bean. (I'm saying this because I'm certain that would be much easier to do, given how easy the prop would be to make, and how very difficult it would be by comparison to have the kids appearing to bite it if it was phototouched.)

Throughout the piece, the writer appears reluctant to suppose that 19th Century photo pranksters might be every bit as witty as his self-conscious hipster ass, in their own way. In fact, people of the age had an excellent sense of humour, every bit as refined as ours (more so, perhaps); the media of the age just did not record a good deal of it, compared to how much stilted prose and pomp-and-circumstance reportage did get preserved. That gives many modern people the impression that these were stuffy, unfunny people, when the opposite is very much the case: they're humans just like us, and enjoyed a good laugh just as much. Images like these were the lolcats of their day, and done strictly for laughs. They were not done, as the writer weakly implies, to try to convince people of 'agricultural largess.' (A word he misuses, by the way: 'largess' means 'generosity'. He means 'abundance,' but is trying to sound erudite; and failing.) This was a mostly agrarian society, and almost everyone was familiar with farming, even if all they did was hire farmers. Very few people of the time would have been fooled for one second by images of giant produce.