Image description: 1951 — “Little Lebowski,” Jeff Bridges, P and his celebrity father, Lloyd Bridges.
(Originally published on beige.party: 2024-02-20)
I thought that was Sean Penn.
yeees,that’s his name!Thank You
Because it’s been remastered, essentially, from its original format and resolution. I’m sure that you could color “correct” it to a more modern state, but then you’d be the one doctoring it.
Can you explain this in a bit more detail?
Do you mean rescanned from the original negative? Is that remastering? It’s not a term I’ve heard applied to photography much.
Hence “essentially”, yep. It’s been updated, whether by hand or by algorithm or both, and the finished result is a hybrid of old format & resolution and modern graphic standards.
So I did some research I to this and yeah, it might look like that but this image was lifted from the Getty image archive where they claim it is just a high res scan of the original medium format negative.
I suspect they applied some dust removal and maybe a contrast curve.
You’d be surprised how good some of these negatives can look after all this time, right?
The image itself was taken by a chap called Murray Garrett. He used to be Bob Hope’s personal photographer, but shot loads of celebrities up until the late 60s.
Look at this banger of Marilyn Munroe
My Samsung has a remaster option for photos that could have easily spit out an image like OP’s if applied to the original.
Because of all the jpeg that’s in it now instead of film noise.
I’d say it’s because they’re rich and lived in a mid century modern home, which is a fairly mainstream style today. MCM style is now being used in “cookie cutter” new construction. For example, the sconce looks like something I could buy at home depot. The home has very clean lines, is unadorned, and well manicured which are hallmarks of the style.
Also, the dad is dressed in a throwback 1920s style suit and hair. This contrast of “prohibition era” fashion and MCM design makes it more difficult to date. We see a lot of design mashups in today’s world, but it was less common in past decades, so that may be adding to the illusion imo.
For some reason his expression seems more modern to me. It’s like he’s a looking at the camera to tell us we’re probably wondering how he got here, but it’s so beyond the days of Ferris Bueller, which is itself decades beyond how this picture feels, that the subject doesn’t even need to say the line. They know we know they’re looking straight into the camera, that the 4th wall is dead. That feels postmodern to me and therefore contemporary.
This just looks like an old picture to me
Because his dad has a bitchen hairdo!
the thing that stands out to me is that he’s acknowledging the camera. feels more intimate and like we know them