Endless Thread - Snacktime: Restoration

Episode Date: September 26, 2019

Alex found an old and very rare family photo. The only problem? It was damaged to the point that the faces were completely unrecognizable. So...he turned to Reddit.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. Time for a snickety snack. Classic apple sound. That's classic false snack, baby.

I've got a non-classic fall snack. I actually have options. Do you want a noisy snack or a quiet snack or a sneaky snack? Get sneaky. Ew. It sounds gross. I can barely hear it, but what I hear I don't like. I guess you can't guess it.

Is it a pillow? Are you eating a pillow? Is it a marshmallow? Yeah. It's a marshmallow. Sugar pillows. This week is a snack time week where we talk about our favorite stories from Reddit in between our more full meal episodes. Though in a way, this is more than a snack.

It's almost like an appetizer? Or a dessert? Because a couple of weeks ago, you heard us talk with. the Reddeter Bat Brat, who solves Reddit mysteries at an impressive rate with her knowledge of antiques and design. We were going to put her in our episode about memory, but she didn't quite fit. So we're bringing her back today with a story from another Redditor about how she helped him preserve something that was near and dear to his family.

Take a listen. Can you describe the photo for us? So, yeah, the photo is an older couple holding a baby in front of the television. in front of the television, posing for the picture in a room which is a much older furniture. This is Alex. He's from Ireland, as you may have noticed, and he's showing us an old photograph. It's basically a traditional old Irish house somewhere in the countryside, which probably didn't have running electricity or water. Who's in the photo? So that'll be my great-grandmother, my great-grandfather, and my mother, of course, that's the baby.

It's the only photo my mom has of herself at such an age or even as a kid. So it's quite precious to her. It's also the only photo Alex's mom has of herself with her grandmother, who's holding her and looking on adoringly as her baby-sized hand puts an oversized piece of bread in her mouth. My mom was very close with her grandmother. My mom has a lot of good memories with her, such as going and visiting herself. And from what I've heard is a very kind of warm grandmother, very opening and caring for my mom. How did you come across this photo?

So it's actually a very nice story. Myself and my partner were over in a mom's for dinner. And basically, as any parent would, she decided to take out all of the children pictures and embarrassing pictures. Oh, yeah. I think everyone's experienced. It's a right of passage, really. If they can't handle the embarrassing photos, how much further do you want to take the relationship? You know what I'm saying?

Exactly. So she took out the book and we're looking through the photos and this photo appeared. And as she stopped her and asked about it, you know, oh, I'd never seen the photo before. Which isn't all that surprising, given the condition the photo was in. The best way I could describe it is catastrophic to the point that a lot of it is many years of it being bent. where the actual print on the front of the picture has come off, probably. There has been scratches, and you can barely see most of the faces due to the fact of probably damage from the sun as well. I couldn't even imagine what the full picture looked like at the time.

But Alex had an idea. He had recently stumbled upon a Reddit community that he thought could help. You posted this in the R-slash-estoration, aka the Restoration community on Reddit. For people who don't know what that is, can you explain R-slash esteration? It's a community of people who seem to have a passion for restoring older pictures. Some people find their own pictures and restore them, and then there's also people who go there and request others to help out doing a bit of restoration. People like Alex.

He posted the photograph, and he waited. It wasn't actually very long before someone responded with their attempt at restoring the photo. and then another person. There was progress, but it seemed that the face of Alex's great-grandfather, which endured most of the wear and tear, just couldn't be put back together. To be honest, I did lose hope a little bit. Not in a disappointing sense, but more of a kind of realization of how bad the picture was damaged. With seeing a lot of the samples on the restoration page, you know,

there might be a few creases or blurs or color correction requirements, but in comparison, this photo was a different level to anything else that they were doing there. But pretty soon, Alex got another response from a user named Bat Brat, aka... Michelle. Hi, Amory. Hey, Ben's here too. Oh, cool. Hey, Michelle, how are you?

I'm good. Michelle Spalding lives in Colorado. She's a freelance illustrator and graphic designer. She also frequents R-Stero. scrolling through Redditor's photo, restoration requests, and taking on projects when she can. All pro bono. Can you describe one of the restorations that you are proud of that you worked on?

Well, there was one a few months ago, half a year ago or so, where a man posted a photo of his best friend's mother. And it was the only photo that this man had of his mother. because she had died in childbirth. And the photo was in really bad shape. It had been scribbled on and had some stains. And there was another one, kind of a similar story where a woman, her mom only had one picture of her grandparents

and only one picture of herself as a small child. Sound familiar? That photo was just in. horrible, horrible condition. I had to do a lot of restoration on that one. And it turned out pretty good. I was very proud of that one. It took a lot of time. A lot of time and a lot of Zen. You know, sometimes all day, sometimes, you know, into the next day, I would say I've spent upwards of 20 hours on one. It's soothing in a way, kind of like a meditative process to see the improvement come gradually.

Michelle's restoration work was featured on the website Bored Panda a few months ago, and she wrote about working on Alex's photo, how she manually filled in the cracks created by the crinkles and scratches, how she used her knowledge of anatomy to balance the shading in a way that was consistent with the shape of Alex's great-grandfather's skull, how she squints to get a different perspective on her subjects. Sometimes you really just have to zoom in and go pixel by pixel. especially in areas where, you know, detail is important around the face and that sort of thing.

You have to really work in a very tedious, meticulous way to get it to come out looking realistic and not paint it over. In the case of Alex's family photo, the results are jaw-dropping. I was absolutely in shock. I had to just straight away text my girlfriend and tell her to come into the room and have a look at it. and we were just both amazed by it. The photo was brought back to life in comparison to what it was. She went about reconstructing the face of my great-grandfather, which she would have had to literally reconstruct

and or design a face to put there. And my mom is amazed how accurate that was. It's as if she was getting references from different photos, which she wasn't. That was just the only part I can think of is flabbergasted regarding it. Redditors were flabbergasted too. The restoration got posted elsewhere on Reddit, and it got more than 90,000 upvotes.

And I was sitting there going, oh, my God, my mom's going to kill me. Everyone knows now that there's pictures of her. But since showing her that she was delighted. She was thrilled to see how many people appreciated the picture. The restored photo has been printed and placed in the family photo album, right next to the tattered original. I think the photos how they bring us back to kind of

the time that they were snapped, it's definitely with older photos, it's a lot more appreciative, I think, because in more modern days where there's so many photos taken that they're not appreciated enough. What does it mean to her to have this photo restored? A missing piece, in a sense,

that has been put there. When she received the photo and didn't she got to put the photo right next to the original, it just felt like the book was completed, you know, as in like there's a piece that was missing from it and that that's now been resolved. I just have to say I have to thank Bat Brat so much for the time and that he spent into it and I have to thank her just for bringing that bit of smile back to my

mum when she got to have the photo. Okay, that's all for this week. We will be back next week with a full episode. Later nerds. Fellow nerds. Most deaf.