The Whole Story

On September 2nd 2010, on my blog Barf Stew - I ran as a headline `Mohawk Punk Time-Traveler Caught in 1905 Banana Pier Photo' - a photo that I found on the award winning website Shorpy's a day or two prior. Indeed, immediately upon seeing the photo on Shorpy I KNEW I was going to use it in a RUSE of sorts - a tongue in cheek effort to throw some light on `time-travel' (a subject I cover often on Barf Stew) and to `mock' a man in the `alternative' community that believes he has found HIMSELF in an oldtime photo.

I also knew that earlier in 2010 that a similar photo went viral about a `Hipster' Time-Traveler - that was eventually disected by a fine website named Forgetomori. Indeed, I was so sure this photo was worthy - that I alerted two fellow bloggers that I would have something big the next day (when I posted).

Immediately, the day after I posted - the two fellow bloggers (and writers with me on The C Influence Blog) - who run The Debris Field and Phantoms and Monsters - carried my photo link and post on their site. But, at about 6 in the morning - I posted to Reddit my link - and within minutes I had 25 hits and nearly a thousand by the end of the day. The next day - The Anomalist picked up my Barf Stew post and gave it a great write-up - and suggested that it was a tongue in cheek effort. Eventually, The Anomalist picked the link up again when Forgetomori decided to weigh in on my picture http://forgetomori.com/2010/fortean/do-you-feel-lu... (without EVER listing my original story link).

I also got a few hits from Area 51 which covers links of The Anomalist and others.

So, Forgetomori started off the comments about the picture with an in-depth analysis about haircuts and more - but, it was really only the beginning of the public and blogger analysis of the photo. Next came this in-depth look at the picture from a site called Ectomo - a paranormal site. The Ectomo analysis I'll get to in a moment after noting some of these comments from a forum that also took up the controversial photohttp://www.alien-ufos.com/conspiracy-theories/32149-mohawk-punk-time-traveler-caught-banana-pier-1905-picture.html - here's some comments from the actual post and the various websites that carried my post on Barf Stew.

Comments:

1. Isn't that the lead singer for the Clash...? Hmmmmm? LOL

2.All of you should be ashamed to mock the guy with the big spider on his head.

3.The barber who was shaving his head at the time was shot through the window, for giving the previous customer a bad haircut, so he couldn't finish this dude's,

4.Not that there was any doubt, but if you look at the original, I don't think it is a fake, but i also think this guy is just a local with short hair. It is not really a mohawk as such.... Great post, I love old photos.

5.I honestly believe that this photo is NOT doctored. I believe the guy simply has a whitewall haircut. I can't find an example here, but I feel certain I saw 19th century photos of some Scandinavians with this kind of haircut.

6.The thing leading me to believe this could be doctored is the oddity that he's the only one there without a hat and is wearing a different top to anyone else (short sleeved),

7.Yup... that's what his hairstyle looks like... seen pictures like that before in my northern European great grandmother's (something like that), old sepia photograph collection of relatives tht my family has... Some of those types of hairstyles look like bad day self done hack job haircuts to me... the poor couldn't afford to pay for haircuts... It's also obvious why he has no hat and looks different to the rest... He's one of the hired deckhand and help for the boat and they often never wore hats and dressed quite differently to the 'gentelmen' in the suits and hats who obviously are the 'paying' pasengers for the boat(s)..

8.Yeah, Fen. Many native americans wore Mohawks and the hair style was named after the tribe called the Mohawks.

9.If he wore a legit mohawk (think liberty spikes) and like a sex pistols t-shirt then I would think about it

10.It doesn't seem that much out of place really...

Not really any signs of digital tampering...

11.It looks like an ordinary dock worker from his time. His other suspender is back behind him. There's something going on and you can see that the local constable is there in a white shirt. You can almost see the badge on his shirt (left pocket) and he's wearing a hat that's different than anyone else, white at that. I think it's a tremendous stretch to make such a bold statement concerning this guy in the white undershirt being a time traveler. Now, if you show me a picture from the past with a cell phone in it, you'll make a believer of me, not about the possibility of time travel, but that the guy you're looking at is, indeed, a time traveler.

12.There is a line of longshoremen, unloading bananas from the cargo hold at the left lower corner of the photo, to the wagon on the pier.

The guy with the exotic haircut is standing right in the middle, waiting for the next stalk of bananas coming from the two guys in front of him.

So he is obviously one of the longshoremen

13.You ARE kidding, right? You DO see that it's more of "high and tight", with a fairly full top; and certainly no "landing strip" of hair on top as with the true Mohawk? Also, you DO know that from late in the 19th century until well in the middle of the 20th that it was quite common for Caucasian men, particularly if they had at one time served in the American, British or Western European military, to wear their hair almost to the scalp on the sides and backs, but with their top longer...sometimes MUCH longer? Even if you were goofing here, this kind of intellectual slovenliness just displays the ignorance of your poster....and how ready other ignorant cretins are to carry on with his work.

14.You give retarded people a bad name. He is just a dock worker dressed exactly like the individual behind him to the right. Such ludicrous supposition only re-enforces my view.

15.He is unique in at least one fashion, he is virtually the only one the photo not wearing some type of hat. It's possible that everyone is wearing the same hairstyle. More likely that he woke up after a hard night of drinking and couldn't find his other suspender. Kind of a cool picture though.

16.If you will look at the whole picture there are several men either taking off or putting on shirts, etc. So the fact the subject doesn't have a coat on is not unusual. Also the other half of his suspender is probably behind his back. If you look closely at the so-called 'Mohawk' it looks more like a piece of cloth, though I don't know why it would be on his head. Like many professionally taken pictures of this time period this one is extremely sharp and from looking at everything going on and the people that are moving something in their hands I think this is a photo of American-style clothing being given to some new immigrants and this person just happens to be a bit slow about getting his. No "time-traveller" here, just a very good example of a person not looking at what he is seeing.

17.Cliff Pickover focused on the out of focus Man With A White Hat just in front of our subject.

I'm glad everyone is having fun with this - Shorpy is a great site for real time-travel. (I sent this to Cliff Pickover too)

18. Who's jacket and hat is hanged up against the inner wall of the ship in the bottom right corner? Right next to the big bunch of Bananas.

Now, as I said, Ectomo REALLY got into the photo - with analysis like this:

Sensing clicks, a somewhat tongue-in-cheek sequel to the time traveling hipster has surfaced more recently, appropriating a nifty though not that unusual photo from 1905 New York.......Each of these cases is baffling. These images are propagating on the internet, a repository not just of a massive chunk of human knowledge, but one where vintage photos are readily available and a steady stream of amusement. It's not the vaunted collapse of objective knowledge or authority or the usual arguments that all is lost because the information age decenters "good" information. It's not that at all.....Instead, it is the realization that no matter how well documented the past becomes, no matter how much it is described, photographed, curated in museums, and preserved by heritage laws, it becomes an alien place. Objects, clothes, people, devices, ideas that we might recognize as not that different, we simply can't believe existed in the past. The past is foreign territory, and we have become so convinced of this that even a hint of the familiar is jarring because we expect something other. We instead envision our past in symbolic little chunks. People in the 1940s have to look like they stepped out of a Rosie the Riveter poster or an episode of Band of Brothers. The farther back we go, the stronger the symbols must become, passing flapper dresses and bowlers, monocles and sideburns, waistcoats and powdered wigs as we travel through time. And that's just the realist perspective, never mind the postmodern fantastical, imagining what ifs and it would have been cools of aether goggles, Nazi necromancers, flying monks, secret societies, Nazca balloons, and so on. Insert well-read discussion of simulacra and the imagined past here. ...It's almost as if an inverse law is in effect. As we gain ever greater ability to see and hold the past, our collective memory getsshorter and shorter until the nostalgia recycling period drops closer and closer to a decade in length, after a few decades we can't recognize what is real, and within a century only our myths and fantasies remain in any meaningful way.

See Barf Stew for more.

See My Original Link and Post here - http://barfstew.blogspot.com/2010/09/mohawk-punk-t...

Shorpy Original - http://www.shorpy.com/node/8843