Warning! This is going to be one of my off-the-wall posts so hang on. (ha)
Now that there are so many photo editors with “Saturation” and “Vibrance” buttons it seems like every photo on the web is extremely dramatized. Everyone has the bug, but as usual, I am a contrarian. I admit I do sometimes flick those buttons a notch or two and maybe even use the “Blue sky” sometimes but that’s about it. I like my photos to have some sense of reality.
When I see these oversaturated photos I almost immediately think of Edward G. Robinson in the movie Soylent Green. I don’t know how many of you remember that movie made in 1973. It was about the world in 2022 (yeah, that’s three years away) when due to pollution, overuse, and a population explosion, the world was starving. Nourishment for the population was provided by a giant corporation called Soylent Industries. They proclaimed that their product was from ocean plankton. Its most popular product was high protein Soylent green wafers. I think you get the idea.
Finishing the story, the government at the time supported “self-euthanasia” to anyone who wanted to end their lives. One of those was the Edward G. Robinson character. Those who wanted to die were laid out in a bed with clean sheets and with a huge video screen in front of them as shown in the image at the top of this post.
Now to get finally to the point of this post. The videos shown to the person soon to be killed were from the time fifty years before. The videos were hyper-saturated in order to cause awe (as in shock and awe) in the recipient who was about to die. When I see the super-saturated pictures around today, I always think of the death theatre in the movie. By the way, if you haven’t seen the picture, soylent green was made from people!
