I'm not sure many young people nowadays realize how horrible the situation was just half a century ago.
This is a great point. We've made so much progress in this area that "pollution" can seem like an abstraction. This is something we should be impressing upon our children, in a more serious way than stories about walking to school uphill in the snow both ways, etc.
I was two years old when this picture was taken in my home-town. I remember summer days in the following years that looked like this, with the brown air leaching colors from the sunlight itself.
That isn't brown air; it's a brown print. That's a sepia print of a black and white photo of white steam coming out of chimneys artificially crowded together by a long telephoto lens, taken at sunset, and excluding the sky as much as possible. Imagine another photo taken from the same spot, with a wide-angle lens that shows mostly sky and a bridge going off for miles, even the distant cars clearly visible through clear air shining in the mid-day sun as if on their way to the beach, printed blue-and-white instead of brown-and-white. Dramatically different emotional impact from the same scene. It's almost as if The Atlantic had some sort of agenda.
Those images of Shanghai (and London 1952, and Beijing and Hong Kong and, occasionally, Singapore) are the real thing, looking like scenes from a forest fire but downtown in a major city.
That isn't brown air; it's a brown print ... chimneys artificially crowded ... taken at sunset.
You may be right, it may be a sepia print. I don't know that much about sepia. GIMP shows 26K unique colors, and plenty of information in all three layers when decomposed to HSV or LAB. I would have thought a sepia print would be closer to monochrome.
I can assure you the brown skies were real, and that there's not much "artificial" about the crowding of the smokestacks. I still live nearby; the difference between the air quality then and now is pronounced.
It's really an odd thing to do, to approach a stranger on the internet and suggest that their memories are false and any evidence that might support them is effectively fake. How does that go over at dinner parties?
I commented on the photo, not your memories. I didn't comment on your memories, because I had nothing to say about them. They sounded right to me, which wasn't worth a comment.
As a photographer, there were some things that jumped out at me immediately about that photo, though. I commented on it and stand by those comments.
Since you apparently thought I was talking about you and not the spin techniques of The Atlantic--a faux pas I've probably committed at dinner parties--I should have prefaced my comments with, "I think you're right. That photo, on the other hand, ...."
That's a really narrow construction of what you said. I said "I remember brown skies just like this" and you suggested that 1) The color is fake 2) I might imagine that scene with blue skies 3) the Atlantic has an axe to grind and 4) other cities have "the real thing." What am I supposed to think?
The photos were part of an EPA project specifically conceived to "document subjects of environmental concern." There was editorial intent, certainly, but nobody at The Atlantic had anything to do with it. This is all explained on The Atlantic's page.
I'm trying to find out if the photo is in color or not. Certainly most of the DOCUMERICA project was in color, certainly every other photo chosen for this Atlantic feature was color, and certainly the photographer seems to have worked almost entirely with color at the time:
It would not surprise me, at this point, to learn that the photo was in color. I don't think there is anything artificial-looking about it, it matches my memories pretty well. Yes, it has a nearly monochromatic look to it, but some scenes are really like that. Unfortunately the National Archives record doesn't seem to indicate whether the photo was in color or not:
Do you have any information about scans of sepia photos? How many unique colors might be expected? I have tried doing a color count on several old photos that I'm confident started as real sepia-tint, and found color counts in the 6K-13K range, significantly fewer than the 26K that appear in the Clark Avenue Bridge photo. But I don't think that's conclusive.
There is one clue: Sepia (AFAIK) is a process applied to silver-based prints, but the National Archives record for the photo lists its media type as a slide. If that's right, it's not sepia. And since the brown color wouldn't be from a black-and-white slide either, I think the most likely explanation is that it's a color photo.
This is a great point. We've made so much progress in this area that "pollution" can seem like an abstraction. This is something we should be impressing upon our children, in a more serious way than stories about walking to school uphill in the snow both ways, etc.
I was two years old when this picture was taken in my home-town. I remember summer days in the following years that looked like this, with the brown air leaching colors from the sunlight itself.
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/documerica111611/s...
From here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/documerica-images...
It didn't compare to the Great Smog, of course, but for Americans, it's closer to home and of course also closer to the present.