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Comment by rkachowski | Hacker News Reader

The past was also not black and white and grey, or sepia toned. The original photographs and film are imperfect captures of the environment at the time. Given this it feels there's a fallacy in holding the source material as somehow more accurate because it was produced by then contemporary technology - it's all just approximation

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It's not that the source material is accurate, it's that our knowledge is based on the source material, so the limits of the source material make clear the limits of our knowledge.

It's kind of like the concept of "significant digits" in science. If your experimental apparatus can only measure a value with precision plus or minus one tenth, it's inappropriate to report your results with digits out the thousandths. Doing so would make it seem more precise to the reader, but the additional precision is an illusion.

In much the same way, using software in 2020 to guess what things "really looked like" can give viewers a false impression of how much we actually know about what things really looked like.

I am now imagining up-scaling my ruler to be accurate to 0.000001"

Wouldn't the same logic apply to someone drawing or painting a historical event based on written source material?

I find it hard to believe these academics would criticize Paul Philippoteaux for the Gettysburg Cyclorama despite it going far beyond the limits of the source material.

Are you saying that we should only display dinosaur bones and never draw illustrations of what the dinosaurs actually looked like, because it might fool someone into thinking we know more than we actually do?

The source material doesn't lie to you, though. The black and white you see is the true brightness of the scene, without any fake colours dreamed up by a neural network. Your mind is free to fill in the details itself without having someone else's guess at them imposed on it.

It is like the difference between a film adaptation of a text and the original text. If you see the film first, it will permanently colour your reading of the text, taking away from you the opportunity to draw your own meanings from a blank slate.

Hold on -- every capture of reality, whether it's a 100-year-old black and white video camera or a modern day 3d video -- "lies" to you. There is no such thing as an objective capture of reality. Media is inherently representative, from the limitations of the medium itself to the biases of the recorder in what they choose to focus on and what they choose to not film. Hell, even our own eyes lie to us frequently.

The sky did not literally look like that either, when Van Gogh painted it. You are missing the point.

I don't understand, van gogh made art in his own style whilst these films and photos attempted to document and capture the state of the world

Photographers and filmmakers also make art in their own style. There is no such thing as a perfect representation of the world on film: they are compressing the dynamic range and adjusting the color/brightness profiles through the film they use, the exposure settings and any added filters on the camera, the development process for the film (chemicals, timing, pushing/pulling), the paper for the print (photography) or the film for the positive print (movies), the dodging/burning of the print, and others.

It's not about correcting the image to match what their eyes see, it's an artistic and creative act because a photograph/movie can never represent what the eyes see, and photographers/filmmakers have to interpret the image to get their message across.

I totally in no way meant to imply that camerawork has somehow less artistic value than any other medium, but just as pencil and paper can be used to produce technical drawings of architecture and field sketches to outline geography, documentary footage can be recorded with the primary intent of capturing a scene and setting before rendering a creative work.

I believe gridlockd's point was that the colorization and interpolation applied to these films and photos is a modification to and a stylistic choice about a representation of the state of the world, in the same way Van Gogh's skies are modifications and stylistic choices about the skies he saw.

It's not even so much about stylistic choice but about the historicity of it. Van Gogh belongs to an era in art history. If you chose to paint in this style today it would have a different meaning, even if it looked the same.

The way these photographs look is as much part of history as what they portray - whether intentional or not. These enhancement processes will remove that part.

Intent isn't necessarily the significant part of a historical artifact, but even then: The way these photos look is part of the state of the world at the time. The way they aged is part of history.

What does it mean for something to be "old"? What does it mean for something to be "well-preserved through time"? All of this is information that may not be significant to you, but it may be significant to a historian and their audience.

An artist is executing a vision with the tools available. The final product is what they intended. And sometimes not (see how George Lucas kept updating Star Wars as new tech came out to match his vision).

But for historical documents, the creators are usually hamstrung by technology, not embracing it. If they could have had 4K HDR, I'm sure they would have.

Van Gogh would still use oil on canvas to execute his vision.

The historical films also represent the directors' vision, as they had to choose the lens/film/exposure/processing to interpret the image and get their message across. 4K HDR would just gives them more knobs to tweak. A documentary has less control over what happens in front of the camera, but the whole workflow behind the camera is still completely under the directors' control.

With regards to Van Gogh, seeing how he likes to make his paintings three dimensional (if you ever had a chance to see his paintings in person) in additional to his sculptural works, I wouldn't be surprised if he became a 3D graphics or VR artist had he lived in modern times.

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