On the contrary, PS is an improvement in your eyes. A better anology would be night-vision goggles. You can "see" a lot better with PS. In the same way you can "see" better with amplified starlight.
The last paragraph sort of says: "You are either wrong or trivially true. If you are trivially true, I agree with you."
If, on the other hand, you are not implying that the wool is being pulled over our eyes and are only stating that the Proudin-Gorsky images have been rendered in a a modern style rather than in a Technicolor or Kodachrome style or in the style that you would have seen if you were to have seen Proudkin-Gorsky project them with his lanterns, then point taken.
Again, your premise is wrong. The information content is higher. As established above. So, this breaks down the next part of your argument, too: that PS is like film. Again, film is what I put into the starlight scope. What comes out has amplified latent information.
This leaves what I'm saying as something else altogether and hopefully at once clearer and more agreeable. Lets call this the "enhanced information hypothesis". This is how you get your HD.
So where does that leave us? I think two things follow. One, it explains why people react to these images and remark about their information content and their contemporary feel. Contemporary images have more (color) information in them, and the structure of this information is often unique. But, because its unique (to the present) it is incongrous with the past. The way I would put this is it may help us visualize the past. But I'm not sure it brings us any closer to the past. That is, in sense of shared experience with the people of the past. They would have had a cool thing with their "lanterns". But we are sort of looking at another ball game.
Again, There are gradations, etc to this way of putting it. Nothing is absolute. But I think its directionally correct. Its important enough to take note of, and not to dismiss. It also steers well clear of making any leaps onto further implications about XYZ (veracity, accuracy, etc) which are at once imprecise and unncessary; not relevant to my points but areas of concern you have expressed.
I might certainly buy that claim. I don't think that most people here were concerned with the artistic intent so much as the documentation of a past reality.
As to information content, your claim is that there is more information content in these reconstructed images than would have been received at Proudin-Gorsky's eyes while he was taking the photographs? I find that a bit hard to believe. Though I suppose sharpening via some sort of deconvolution might amount to that. Also, we don't need anything so "esoteric" as either night vision goggles or Photoshop to get more information onto a piece of photographic paper than would have been seen with the naked eye. A long exposure or a polarizing filter on the camera can do that.
[As to ... your claim is ...?] [I find that a bit hard to believe.] [A long exposure or a polarizing filter on the camera can do that.]
The combination of self-referential straw-man-building and false-false hypthesis rejection is priceless.
Polarizing filters and long lenses? Really now.
I'm very intrigued by your description of Gursky's photo being full of mind-bending and subtle tricks. What is unnatural about the space? I see what looks like compression, possibly by the use of a long lens.
Now you're like a drunk at the bar talking-shit. In over his head. Talking to someone with real experience. Not imaginary, illusory braggadocio.
Last call for you.
For other HN readers of this thread, there is real information presented here. Ideas that might benefit them. Provding an increased understanding of the world.
Fore nessus42, your false dichotomies and outdated academic modalities, are just the opposite. They are not enlightening or powerful. Nor even intimidating. Just sad and dull.
We leave them behind.
On the topic of overexposure: Let us not burn our film.
It is time to move on.
But one can make the very same case that Technicolor and Kodachrome and every other photography technology that has ever existed, is as much fabrication as reality. What I'm not seeing here is any evidence to backup the assertion that these particular images are less psycho-visually accurate than if they had been rendered in a different common style. Sure, with Photoshop and/or other software, you have a much bigger toolbox for messing with reality than you used to have in a darkroom, and you can consequently do all sorts of things that I would consider to be more fabrication than representation, but I've seen no evidence yet presented that this is what has occurred here.
One thing that we seem to agree on is that the style that has been used for many of the renderings is an HD video style. One of the things that I was taught by film professors is that the reason that video looks "cheaper" than film is that video is actually more accurate in a lot of ways than film, and we've just been trained by our culture to view the less accurate rendering in film as more classy. I don't know if this claim about film being less accurate than video is true, but if it is, then this might explain why an attempt to render the Proudin-Gorsky images as accurately as possible would end up with them looking like HD video.
I wouldn't, however, be surprised to learn that the images were not rendered as accurately as possible, and the HD video style was specifically chosen, but that choice would also make sense, psycho-visually. If we're not used to seeing photographs rendered in a form as psycho-visually accurate as is possible, we might not experience them as accurate due to our cultural bias.
If, on the other hand, you are not implying that the wool is being pulled over our eyes and are only stating that the Proudin-Gorsky images have been rendered in a a modern style rather than in a Technicolor or Kodachrome style or in the style that you would have seen if you were to have seen Proudkin-Gorsky project them with his lanterns, then point taken. (It would certainly be interesting to see them rendered in a form a close as possible to how they would have been seen in the day.)