#2 Conrad Veidt In His Role As Gwynplaine In The 1928 Film "The Man Who Laughs"
Just because Photoshop didn’t exist back then doesn’t mean early photographers couldn’t get creative. In fact, they found plenty of ways to manipulate photos without any tech, relying on chemistry and careful handiwork.
As a result, their efforts produced images that were beautiful, strange, or downright scary, depending on what the photographer was aiming for.
One popular technique in the mid-19th century was hand-tinting black-and-white daguerreotype and carte de visite photographs.
Daguerreotypes, invented in 1839, used images on silver-plated copper and became widely popular during the Civil War era. If you’ve ever seen old photos with faded color, like the ones here, that’s how they were made.
#6 Coal Miners Returning From The Depths After A Days Work, Belgium, Circa 1900
In time, albumen prints, including cartes de visite and cabinet cards, became a go-to for photographers. The paper base provided a steady surface that made hand-coloring far easier than working with daguerreotypes.
Take, for example, these hand-colored albumen prints from late 19th-century Japan showing sumo wrestlers, women in kimonos, and even a man with a full back tattoo.
#8 The Marriage Of 22-Year-Old Charlie Johns And 9-Year-Old Eunice Winstead Was A Child Marriage That Took Place In The State Of Tennessee, United States, In January 1937
#10 Ella Harper, Known As The "Camel Girl", Was Born With A Very Rare Orthopedic Condition That Caused Her Knees To Bend Backwards, Called Congenital Genu Recurvatum
Photographers also developed techniques to make prints brighter and their subjects look more appealing.
A British photography journal from 1875, for instance, advised using a sharp, fine-pointed pencil to add highlights, and suggested brightening areas like cheeks that printed too dark by “cross-hatching with a rather blunted pencil.”
#11 Operation Doorstep Was A Civil Defense Test. In Operation Doorstep, Blast And Thermal Effects Were Evaluated On Mannequins
#12 Portrait Of German Architect Carl Weber And His Wife, Emily Of Stratford In 1850, Just Hours After She Died
Victorians, in general, were quite fond of using the “Photoshop” of their era to look better on camera.
Beyond pencil scratchings that brightened faces, photographers used various tricks to slim waists, adjust necklines, reshape arms, and tweak features like mouths, hair, and eyes.
No Facetune required to look snatched.
#14 A British Merchant Being Carried By A Sikkimese Lady On Her Back. West Bengal Circa 1903
#15 Two Wax Department Store Mannequins Melt During A Heat Wave In London, 1929, Allegedly. They Also Live In Your Closet And Spy On You When You're Asleep
They didn’t stop at beauty edits, either. Different photographers experimented with all sorts of effects to make images more interesting or downright eerie.
Techniques included distorted images, pinhole photography, mirror portraits, “magic vignettes,” artificial mirages, ghostly double exposures, silhouettes, and even staged “decapitated” headshots.
#18 A Us Navy L-8 Blimp That Continued To Fly After Its Crew Allegedly Disappeared, 1942
Of course, the next question is: how did they pull it off?
Take spirit photography.
In the early 20th century, a British man named William Hope gained fame in Spiritualist circles for allegedly capturing images of ghosts in his photos.
He formed a group called the Crewe Circle, taking advantage of grieving families who had lost loved ones in World War I and wanted proof their relatives were still near.
By 1922, Hope was making good money in London as a spirit photographer and medium, with supporters like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
