March 15

THE HEALING BRUSH
BY GEORGE GEDER
A Monthly - Weekend With Shades - Column

There are some purists who say that you are altering the content or 'intent' of the photographer when you crop or alter an original image. You are messing with reality and their vision. You are automatically a revisionist. Well, yes, but you can take steps to maintain your integrity and that of the image.

It could be argued that the car in the background is important or that the row of houses are relevant to the story and that the image on the right is messing with all that. I can tell you that the the photograph was taken in the autumn of 1951 in Binghamton, New York. That's Pearle and that's me. What more do you need to know?

Once I can identify the person and location in a photo and reasonably give a date to the image, I feel that I can begin to clean it up with impunity. This means removing distracting backgrounds. This helps us to focus on the subject which is usually an ancestor or family member. Consider this series of photographs.

Not bad, but the cheesy background does nothing for me and it doesn't help to date the photo. The person is positively identified as Sayde Hancock, my aunt. When was this photo taken? Here are some clues.

My mother, Pearle, on the left and Aunt Sayde. They're living in Jamaica, New York at the time. The notation on Mom's photo reads "Merry Christmas to Leonard with lots of love, Pearle 1943". Since Pearle and Sayde are sitting in the same chair and sharing earrings, we can safely say the photo was taken at the same time. A copy of Mom's photo was sent to Uncle Leonard, possibly to Camp Croft in South Carolina.

Now here's Aunt Sayde posing by a table with a photo of Uncle Leonard Hancock on it. That's an actual copy of him on the right. He enlisted in 1942; World War II. Now what's interesting to me is Aunt Sayde's hair style in all of the photos. I'm confident to say that the pictures were taken around the same time; give or take a year or two.

So, I'm coming back to the first photo. The most important element in the picture is, of course, Aunt Sayde. By removing the background, it makes her stand out more. What if this was the only existing image of her? Would future generations be at a loss with the missing background? I don't think so. I might add that I wouldn't replace the background with anything, for instance, like the Eiffel Tower, the Bellagio, or the Statue of Liberty. That's where you would run into problems of integrity.

Just to get a guy in here, here's one of my 'new' cousins, Jimmy, and his wife Delores. I cropped and altered the photo to get a portrait of him and to loose the tacky Las Vegas hotel room circa 2004. You see, I know the person, the date, and the location. (And I'm going to clean up the glasses over his left eye). Don't fret, I'm working on picture of Delores too.

In conclusion, altering family photos is not a bad thing. Make sure you annotate the date, location, and any stories that go along with the image. Preserve the original and distribute copies of the enhanced photograph. Be honest and resist attempts to 'falsify' the image by adding things that were not there in the first place.