The Wasp — 1895 — page 655: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This cartoon depicts two well-dressed men consoling a woman sitting on a beach, apparently distressed about amateur photography. The caption reads: "George, there is one of those amateur camera fiends photographing us. Oh, never mind him. When he gets through no one can tell whether we're the end of a barn or the top of Mount Tamalpais." The joke satirizes the widespread amateur photography craze of the early 1900s. The humor turns on the men's dismissal of the photographer as so incompetent that his resulting photos will be indecipherable—unable to distinguish between human subjects and landscape features. This mocks both amateur photographers' poor technical skills and the casual proliferation of cheap cameras enabling mediocre picture-taking among the general public.