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Student photographs people with hidden spy cam in the 1890s (2018)
- jl6 5y agoWe need to talk about casual acceptance of litter and clutter. Clearly it doesn’t have to be that way.
- kristopolous 5y agoIt's not like they lived in a world of takeaway bags with paper cups and disposable cutlery. There was a time when you'd return bottles to the manufacturer and they were seen as responsible for what they chose to manufacture. Somewhere down the line, all of this, 100% of it was placed on the end user - as if the billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees and control of an international supply chain has no agency whatsoever to make any decisions at all and they exist as mere errand boys of the supposedly all powerful consumer. None of these things will be fixable until we collectively stop fantasizing that someone paying $1 for a soda has more power in the fundamental decisions of how it's manufactured than the company's board of directors.
- omk 5y agoYou pose a very valid point and I stand by it. Such an argument is often countered with the cost of rapid progress and providing businesses the autonomy without burdening them with bureaucracy. Cost is also a factor. These pictures seem to come from an era when there weren't many disposable (cheap) materials found in consumer products. Paper, cloth, glass, metal and wood all could be classified as expensive. One could exchange this scrap with a vendor in exchange for a reasonable amount. Plastics simply don't find a place once separated from the utility they packed. Very little incentive for consumers to take it back even if the manufacturer accepted.
- joe-collins 5y agoNot simply takeaway, but disposable packaging in general.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoWe don't actually, because it's obvious; people should put trash in the relevant bins, and the local authorities should pay people to clean it up. Online discourse is not action. Look at e.g. Japan that doesn't have a littering problem, because people don't litter and they pay people to clean up the rest. But as others pointed out, this was before plastics, before the availability of the wide variety of products and services we have today, before chain fast food restaurants. They would have had (waxed) paper and the like, but not to the point where it was so cheap that it would be everywhere.
- Normille 5y agoGreat find. Thanks for posting. I love it when photos from this era occasionally emerge showing people acting naturally. We're so used to seeing the vast majority of Victorian photographs showing dour-faced people sitting or standing stiffly to attention, that it's sometimes difficult to believe they had human emotions, just like us.
- Borrible 5y agoSome were stiff. https://historyofyesterday.com/the-unsettling-victorian-tradition-of-photographing-the-dead-a89adc507aac https://historyofyesterday.com/the-unsettling-victorian-trad...
- jorgesborges 5y agoIt’s great. I also love video footage from that era as well, capturing the ordinary bustle of the streets. It’s fun when it’s local and you can point to familiar places. One of my favourites is Victoria and Vancouver BC around 1900[0]. [0] https://youtu.be/Jp1qWV5OZec https://youtu.be/Jp1qWV5OZec
- KMnO4 5y agoHere’s one from 1895, upscaled to 4k60 and colourized: https://youtu.be/EqbOhqXHL7E https://youtu.be/EqbOhqXHL7E
- mlindner 5y agoThese are horrible.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoThe original seems to no longer be on YouTube; do you have a copy of a non-AI-hallucinated version?
- petilon 5y agoMuch better ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ1OgQL9_Cw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ1OgQL9_Cw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo_eZuOTBNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo_eZuOTBNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQs5VxNPhzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQs5VxNPhzk
- emj 5y agoThere are notes/photos on/of the camera in the previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16049954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16049954
- pessimizer 5y agoWorth linking directly, there are over 150 photos at the old link: https://www.boredpanda.com/spy-camera-secret-street-photography-carl-stormer-norway/ https://www.boredpanda.com/spy-camera-secret-street-photogra...
- dang 5y agoOk, we've switched to that from https://mymodernmet.com/carl-stormer-hidden-camera-photography/ https://mymodernmet.com/carl-stormer-hidden-camera-photograp... above. Thanks!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- keewee7 5y agoOld photographs of my Danish town from the 1890s had the same feel and mood. I think it's the empty streets.
- cranesnakecode 5y agoThis is the first time I've felt like the people in old photos aren't aliens.
- dragontamer 5y agoThe change in "hat culture" is pretty incredible though. That's a LOT of hats!
- jamiek88 5y agoAs a balding man with a round head I wish hats other than Baseball caps were acceptable.
- OJFord 5y agoAs nothing in particular I wish braces were acceptable! They make so much more sense than tightening a belt laterally to defy gravity by friction.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoIf you want to wear them, wear them! You'll get odd looks much less than you think.
- Thorrez 5y agoHuh, I didn't know that suspenders were called braces in England/Australia. I thought you meant dental braces, and was pretty confused at first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspenders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspenders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_braces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_braces
- GoodbyeMrChips 5y ago> I didn't know that suspenders were called braces in England/Australia. This has been the source of some comic misunderstandings, whereby an American bloke says they are/like wearing suspenders, and the listener then assumes they are coming out as transvestite.
- jacquesm 5y agoThis is blog spam, dang, link change please?
- Arnavion 5y ago( https://www.boredpanda.com/spy-camera-secret-street-photography-carl-stormer-norway/ https://www.boredpanda.com/spy-camera-secret-street-photogra... )
- dorkwood 5y agoThe last photo of the man being affectionate with his young daughter is surprising to me. All my life, I've thought that men born before 1950, like my father, just didn't do that sort of thing. And yet here is a man born a hundred years earlier doing just that.
- robbintt 5y agoI believe that people have been exactly like us for tens or hundreds of generations.
- cj9 5y agoFar further back still in so many ways https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv6Tuq1Dkfk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv6Tuq1Dkfk
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoThat’s remarkable comment that really highlights for me how different everyone’s experience can be. My father was born in the early 40s and was apparently nothing like your father. But those two photos are definitely the best for me.
- tagoregrtst 5y agoA lot of our common conceptions of the past are flat out wrong. Often deliberate fabrications for political ends. Why wouldn't fathers, in general, be affectionate? The Bible (to take a very old book) if full of fatherly affection. Take the story of Abraham and his son to be sacrificed. The story has always been shocking because the reader knows the son was so wanted and loved and empathizes. Even the prejudice isn't universal. Italians don't have this conception of cold fathers 100 years ago. Could it be a protestant thing? Possibly except the Norwegians in this set are themselves Protestants. I would chalk up the image of a cold, distant father, to the generational shock of 31 years of slaughter in Europe (1914-1945). Some blame Bismarck and his quest to make perfect soldiers through universal education (and the export of the Prussian model). But, really, the past is not as bad as it is depicted. Life was tougher, but there was love, laughter, loyalty, beauty, and friendship. I suspect more so than today.
- WalterBright 5y agoThe clothing, especially the ladies', look so impractical and uncomfortable.
- ro-no 5y agoI'm the family's unofficial archivist so I inherited a bunch of 8mm reels from the 1950s and most of the camcorder tapes. This candid pictures remind me of those 1950s reels. Since film cameras were new back then, almost everyone in the videos ignored the cameras and carried on with their normal activities. Just normal real life. Those videos are very natural. As the decades pass, people start reacting to the video cameras differently. Videos from the 1980s and 1990s are full of "say hello to the camera scenes" when people unnaturally turn to the camera and say hello to it or make faces to it. In the 2010s, cameras become smaller people start showing their best sides when the camera is nearby, like an automatic instagram pose style reflex.
- raflemakt 5y agoNRK (Norwegian state broadcaster) published an article this summer with some more images [0], including of some public figures in Oslo at the time like Henrik Ibsen. [0] https://www.nrk.no/kultur/xl/carl-stormer_-studenten-som-snikfotograferte-ibsen-1.15501709 https://www.nrk.no/kultur/xl/carl-stormer_-studenten-som-sni...
- vidarh 5y agoEveryone ought to click through to this one if nothing else for the images where they've overlaid the photos on present-day Oslo.
- ruined 5y agonear as i can tell, he used a stirn concealed vest camera. http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Stirn_Concealed_Vest_Camera http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Stirn_Concealed_Vest_Camera round film plate. no cassette, just round emulsified glass. six-exposure 14cm or four-exposure 17cm depending on model. exposure is allegedly adjustable somehow, but i'm not sure of the mechanism. plate loads into an internal frame with masks, advanced by the center dial, not sure how masks align. many more of his photos and some images of the camera and exposed plates here https://www.exibartstreet.com/news/19th-century-street-photography-with-a-spy-camera/ https://www.exibartstreet.com/news/19th-century-street-photo...
- geocrasher 5y agoComment deleted because a guy can't state a feeling without dealing with endless pedantry. Gosh.
- btheshoe 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1890s#Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1890s#Wars The 1890s were a rare break in great power conflict, but they were only a few decades after the civil war, Imperialism was in full swing, and there were still plenty of wars. In general, there has not been a more peaceful time than the present.
- geocrasher 5y agoIndeed. My point was that the world had not yet been permanently scarred by global conflict. That's all.
- sandworm101 5y agoThere were plenty of world wars before WWI. WWI was simply the first in which America played a major role. The empires fought each other across the planet long before America was a thing. Nearly every country was repeatedly involved in these conflicts. War was not an unussual thing then nor now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Wars "The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) were a series of major global conflicts pitting the French Empire and its allies, led by Napoleon I, against a fluctuating array of European powers formed into various coalitions." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years%27_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years%27_War "The Seven Years' War (1756–1763) is widely considered to be the first global conflict in history, and was a struggle for world supremacy between Great Britain and France."
- watwut 5y agoAmerica played large role in its own civil war. And in smaller wars with Mexico and what not before.
- saalweachter 5y ago> “When he was a young man at Oslo University he fell in love with a lady whom he did not know and with whom he was too bashful to become acquainted,” writes his biographer. “Wishing at least to have a picture of her, he decided that this was possible only by taking a photograph of her himself, without her knowing.” Oh, technology.
- pomian 5y agoSo. Which one is she!
- brabel 5y agoThere's a pretty, young lady[1] that seems to appear in many of the photos! I was thinking exactly that this was the reason, a teenager in love mischievously taking hidden photos of his love interest, and then just rolling along with it and taking pics everywhere :D [1] https://www.boredpanda.com/spy-camera-secret-street-photography-carl-stormer-norway/?media_id=1056119 https://www.boredpanda.com/spy-camera-secret-street-photogra...
- Markoff 5y agothe OG Glassshole
- khazhoux 5y agoHere's a street view for the 6th image (man tipping top-hat) https://goo.gl/maps/Pxh1QRzRgdn5Lrhc6 https://goo.gl/maps/Pxh1QRzRgdn5Lrhc6
- jerbearito 5y agoVery neat. Thanks for sharing.
- mattlondon 5y agoCurious - I noted the lack of cars and traffic in the old photos. There is none in Street view either! Many times in Street view for London, it is difficult to see the actual street behind the traffic...
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoThere's likely no space for cars (e.g. parking), since it's an old city center. If there is, it's expensive. People that live in older city centers usually don't have a car, a bicycle and public transit gets them far enough.
- MattConfluence 5y agoThat street in particular has been closed for all traffic except buses and trams (and necessary service cars I guess, like the parked van on street view). On [1] you can see Stortingsgata labeled in blue as "kolletivgate" (collective street). As the graphic shows most streets at the very core of the city have been closed to general traffic, the bluish streets are mostly only public transportation and the pinkish streets are mostly pedestrian and bike lanes. Outside the core you see more cars on the roads. [1] https://gfx.nrk.no/NHMVHfHy9jrQCxlLI_D2tAo9jnkLqfcYXajOAEHnalew.jpg https://gfx.nrk.no/NHMVHfHy9jrQCxlLI_D2tAo9jnkLqfcYXajOAEHna...
- 8372049 5y agokollektivgate = public transport only. I don't think 'collective' is used in the same way in English?
- Volker_W 5y agoMen were so much better dressed back then.
- Markoff 5y agoto be fair it's most likely rich people pictured, I would love to see same spy photos from village, I would bet my money people would not be wearing such fancy suits and hats as these urbanites
- MattConfluence 5y ago[1] is a video from a couple decades later (1914) that shows more of the urban middle or lower class folks of Kristiania (it wouldn't be called Oslo until 1925). [1] https://www.nb.no/nbsok/nb/5d19ec53f24eb5909b9316a833b90c38.nbdigital?lang=no https://www.nb.no/nbsok/nb/5d19ec53f24eb5909b9316a833b90c38....
- politelemon 5y agoThanks for sharing that. One thing in common, there certainly were a lot more hats!
- Markoff 5y agowell it's still same Oslo, just under different name, definitely not a village, but yeah those market shots seem closer to reality of majority I guess judging by sellers/kids
- tru3_power 5y agoPeople used to dress so cool in the 1890s.
- jwtorres 5y agoWow all of those people seem so miserable. We are so much better off for our technological advancements ;)
- TheSocialAndrew 5y agoIt seems like back then people were smiling to a passerby and not to the camera. They'd keep a stern face when they were knowingly photographed. Now we smile for the camera, but not so much to a stranger.
- Markoff 5y agoyou read at least the title right, it's SPY cam, so obviously if someone is taking secret photo of you, you don't smile for camera and we don't know who are these people, if it's complete strangers or his acquintances, though some of the photos are clearly staged anyway you could get same reaction even nowadays depending on country, obviously you wouldn't have much success in Eastern Europe, where (many) people consider smiling at stranger as sign of mental illness (at least if it's same gender)
- bhelkey 5y ago> you read at least the title right, it's SPY cam, so obviously if someone is taking secret photo of you, you don't smile for camera and we don't know who are these people, if it's complete strangers or his acquintances, though some of the photos are clearly staged anyway I think you misunderstood their point. In the past people who knew they were about to get photographed tended not to smile. Now people tend to smile. TheSocialAndrew perceives that people now tend not to smile at strangers where as these candid photos show people a hundred years ago smiling at strangers.
- Markoff 5y agoI disagree, back then people were smiling to strangers and not to camera, now people smile in both situations, he was greeting these people so obviously if he greeted them with smile people smiled back, I doubt you would have any different result nowadays from most likely good looking well dressed 19yo kid.
- bhelkey 5y ago> I disagree That's fine. I am not arguing one way or the other. My point is that it is easier to get a response if you focus on the main point of disagreement. In this case, the disagreement is, 'Is it common nowadays to smile at strangers on the street in Oslo, Norway (Where the original pictures were taken)?' TheSocialAndrew says no, Markoff says yes. Edit: Maybe a better question would be, 'Where in the world is it currently common to smile at strangers?'
- cmer 5y agoSomewhat unrelated question that I could probably Google, but I figured it's more interesting to hear your take. Why do people on old pictures look like they're from a completely different era? They look like they're from the 1800s. Is it the camera, the clothing or did they actually look slightly different from us? Or perhaps it's just an illusion? Realistically I wouldn't expect humans' appearance to change that much in 100 years?
- twofornone 5y agoCould be modern lenses, filters, and/or touchups (i.e. photoshop) that distort images in a (typically) flattering way and distort some people's perception of "normal" photographs, since it's all pretty ubiquitous. Cell phones apply all sorts of processing effects, starting with the lense.
- mgkimsal 5y agoFor me it's usually more the quality of the film/print/color/etc. Most 70s pics have a certain color/tone/hue/saturation that says '70s'. 60s too. And so on. There may be easier determinations between 1920s and 1930s pics, perhaps, but not quickly to my eye. What's interesting about these is that... they're candid. Most 1800s photos were people explicitly sitting for a photo. Not smiling. Sitting, posing, very grim. Many of these pics showed people being natural - smiling, chatting to each other, etc. Normal human stuff.
- 13of40 5y agoThe disturbing thing for me is that I noticed that special atmosphere/patina in 70s photos when I was a teenager in the 90s, but now I can see something analogous in pictures from the 90s.
- rjp0008 5y agoThe same thing will exist for people in 2010/2030 because of computational photography filters/algos.
- anshumankmr 5y agoI assume the cat still has one or two lives left.
- fortran77 5y agoPeople's styles changed, but cats still look the same!
- fnord77 5y agopeople looked so friendly
- grishka 5y agoInteresting thing is how I kept subconsciously trying to identify where in St Petersburg each of these was taken — the architecture and overall appearance of Oslo at the time was so similar apparently.
- MattConfluence 5y agoThat's a neat observation, the cities do have a similar history. The medieval town called Oslo burned down in 1624, and a new city was founded on the other side of the bay. It was named Christiania after the monarch Christian. It kept that name until 1925 when they changed it back to the old historical name Oslo. Some decades later, the Russian monarch Peter would also found a new city, which happened to have his name in it. So these two cities were being constructed at around the same time and taking design and architectural inspirations from the same places I would imagine.
- mkdirp 5y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16049954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16049954 I do wonder if this would have been considered creepy back then. Assuming such cameras weren't as prevalent as they are today, it certainly feels like people would have been creeped out if they'd found out about this. Anyway, love the pictures! I'm glad the student decided to be creepy.
- ridgeguy 5y agoThanks for posting this. I'm grateful for the images of predecessors, captured when they were going about their daily lives. t looked like they were in the main happy to be alive.
- toastal 5y agoI'm just thinking of how quiet those cities must be befoul cars
- t-writescode 5y agoIndeed, yelling of the heralds; and horses in shoes with wooden wheels rotating carts (edit: walking cobblestone roads). Very quiet :)
- tokai 5y agoWooden wheels with metal threads on topped cobblestones. The noise from roads was infernal. I guess all the horse dung would have dampened it a bit.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoYou get horseshoes and carts on cobblestones instead, plus the ever present smog of wood and coal fires, the smell of horse dung, etc. I mean there's plenty of European 'old' city centers that are effectively inaccessible by car, doesn't mean they're quiet.
- Lamad123 5y agoSee? There was no need for a notch even back then!
- dataengineer56 5y agoCan we not post boredpanda.com please? It's basically blogspam; anything on it will have been primarily posted elsewhere first.
- xmprt 5y agoDo you have an original source for this set of images? I'm curious to find the original authors or publisher.
- MattConfluence 5y agoThe original photos are in the collection of Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology and can be viewed digitally at https://digitaltmuseum.no/search/?q=Carl%20St%C3%B8rmer&aq=type%3F%3A%22Photograph%22%20owner%3F%3A%22NTM%22&o=0&n=80 https://digitaltmuseum.no/search/?q=Carl%20St%C3%B8rmer&aq=t...
- h1fra 5y agowhat strikes me the most is the emptiness of the streets! Everything seems so unnecessary large and calm; The way it should it be, love it!
- socialdemocrat 5y agoCool! Living in Oslo reckognize a lot of these places. Many buildings have not changed. Street layout is very similar. A lot of downtown Oslo got built around that era. I see Henrik Ibsen is there. He was probably not hard to capture. He walked down to the Grand Hotel every day like clockwork.
- 8372049 5y agoReally weird to see Karl Johan without Nationaltheatret. It got built a few years later.
- harscoat 5y agoSame period as "Hunger" by Knut Hamsun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_(Hamsun_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_(Hamsun_novel)
- tokai 5y agoInterestingly I think that the 1966 movie adaptation visually fits these photographs well. https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjEyMTE2ZGYtZjRhNS00YjY1LTkzNGQtZjE2NDk1NDhhNWFmXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjUyNDk2ODc@._V1_.jpg https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjEyMTE2ZGYtZjRhNS00...
- dpacmittal 5y agoCouldn't find a single obese person in the photos. Really goes to show how the modern living has destroyed our health
- prajwalshetty 5y agoGood observation
- GuB-42 5y agoOr maybe the photographer simply didn't take pictures of obese people, for whatever reason.
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y agoHe just didn't photograph them. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2317764 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2317764
- 8372049 5y agoYou don't usually see many obese people in Oslo these days either. There's certainly a higher average weight now than in these photos, but US-style excessive obesity is rare in Norway. Edit: As of 2019, apparently 3 % of Norwegians are obese (BMI >= 35), while a whooping 30 % are bulky or somewhat fat with a BMI of 27-35. Obviously with the shortcomings inherent in BMI, e.g. not accounting for low fat percentage etc. Too bad the data don't go any higher, it would be interesting to see how many are excessively obese, i.e. BMI of, say, 150 or more. https://www.ssb.no/statbank/table/06181/tableViewLayout1/ https://www.ssb.no/statbank/table/06181/tableViewLayout1/
- nikkinana 5y ago
- llimos 5y agoI have been so conditioned by the Internet of today that I thought #9 had a play button on it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]