I Found a Picture of You
"I found a picture of you, oh oh oh oh.
Those were the happiest days of my life.
Like a break in the battle was your part, oh oh oh oh,
In the wretched life of a lonely heart."
From 'Back On The Chain Gang' by The Pretenders 1984.
The inspiration for this picture comes from Barbaria's blockbuster 'Berlin Diary' (in collaboration with Windar - see BDSM Forum/Mainly Poems and Stories - and - Forum Archive/Stories and Poems.) Barb generously invited her readers to speculate about the details regarding the tragic finale of the story.
Briefly, the heroine, US citizen Barbara Moore, and her German lover, Klaus Erbe, share an epic whirlwind of passion, risk-taking and danger in Berlin during the 1936 Olympics, ultimately escaping certain death by fleeing to Prague, where Barbara disappears. Bereft of his lover and any explanation, Klaus eventually becomes a US citizen and OSS operative during World War 2.
I imagined that Klaus returned to a devastated Berlin in May 1945, for the first time in nearly a decade, to gather evidence for impending War Crimes trials. "If you get any dirt on the Reds, so much the better!" The instructions had been explicit, following references to the Red Army's meteoric drive through East Prussia and the vindictive atrocities inflicted on the civilian population. Klaus didn't have any problem with such duties as a US Intelligence Officer; after all, the Germans were his people too.
Like the scene evoked by Chrissie Hynde in the song, I loved the idea of Klaus finding a picture, by chance in a newspaper and recognising a Berlin street scene depicting a group of Russian women soldiers. Nothing remarkable in that, except that one of them looks uncannily like Barbara and his heart and mind go racing back to 1936. Now his dilemma is one of divided loyalty.
If Barbara really is with the Soviets in Berlin, Klaus is obliged to investigate such activity by an American citizen, potentially discovering evidence of treason. But if he doesn't pursue this opportunity, he will never find the answers to Barbara's disappearance. Whatever else 'Berlin Diary' is (and it is many things - no spoilers - you'll have to read it) it is a love story. Deciding that his allegiance is to Barbara, and knowing he must respect her need for anonymity, he makes no further enquiries, but earnestly desires to believe that this picture confirms that she is safe (if serving in the front line with the Red Army can ever be considered safe!)
The picture found by Klaus was intended to be a casual and unremarkable group of women soldiers, unconsciously posed and oblivious to the camera. It had to appear to be an incidental photograph without attracting attention to any individual (the close-up portrait takes care of that by implying a double take by Klaus!) The best photographs of WW2 Red Army women are consciously posed, but I identified one group which was suitable for accidental recognition by Klaus. More than this, in searching for a similar facial type to Barb's alter-ego, Caprice, the woman second from left was a remarkably close match.
My next task was to find a portrait of Caprice (Barbara) taken at the same angle and with lighting and expression consistent with the original photograph. All of this facilitates mapping Caprice's face onto the original in Photoshop. I reversed and re-scaled Caprice, cut out her face and manoeuvred it over the photo, using a small rotation to map perfectly onto the eyes and mouth of the original image. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Photoshop automatically converted the colour image to the grey-scale of the original base photograph. (I think you can override this by starting with a colour picture.)
The next challenge was to achieve a consistent tonal density with the other faces in the picture. There may be a way of doing this in Photoshop, but I do not know how. Instead, I did it by trial and error in Openoffice Draw. The result still showed a hard edge around the facial cut line, so I moved it into Windows Paint and softened and blended it manually. In Paint I was able to make the necessary lighting corrections to match the other faces, dulling the whites of the eyes, as well as adding the photographic coarse-grained texture in a variety of tones, working in dots all over the face using the fine soft pencil tool.
Eventually I got Caprice's face almost matching the tone and texture of the other three in the group. I put the picture back into Openoffice Draw to convert it to sepia tone, and copied out the enlargement as a separate portrait. It was an interesting challenge but an enjoyable one, and it reflects a Soviet obsession with fake photography! And so, Barb, I 'found' a picture of you...
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