45-year mystery behind eerie photo from The Shining is believed to be solved
cbc.ca125 points by colinprince 3 months ago
125 points by colinprince 3 months ago
What a weird investigation though. Sounds like they could have solved it by asking the photographer first, which they eventually did:
> Finally, Spark contacted Murray Close, the photographer who took the picture of Jack Nicholson that was inserted into the original image.
> The photographer revealed that "there was no such thing as the Warner Brothers photo archive [and] that was a complete mistake."
> Instead, Close had sourced the original photo from the BBC Hulton Photo Library in London, now part of Getty Images.
> The photo, it turns out, was taken at a Valentine's Day dance on February 14, 1921, in the Empress Ballroom at the Royal Palace Hotel in London.
Sounds like a typical investigation to me. You go down a few rabbit holes which turn out to be dead ends, and eventually realize the solution was right under your nose this whole time (this may sound familiar if you've done enough debugging as well). I also suspect the solution wasn't as obvious as the article makes it seem. For sure it should be framed more as a group effort, but that's just the writing style being weird.
Depending on how work was divided up, it doesn’t seem like the photographer of Jack Nicholson would necessarily know where the image Nicholson was superimposed on came from, so I don’t blame them for not checking with him first.
Not quite as it was reported. First, the photo was said to be in the Warner Bros archive - repeatedly, including by Lee Unkrich, the doyen of Shining research - and my multiple attempts to find it failed. That was because it never existed... It had been said by the woman who did the retouching, so you'd expect her to know, but in fact, she didn't. Murray Close didn't take the photo, he took the photo of Jack Nicholson, so no reason at first to assume he knew. It's also difficult to contact such people - he's now a very successful photographer - and it took emails, messages to his instagram, his website, to get a reply to something I'm sure he thought was 45 year old trivia.
Thanks for replying! That's a good reason. Reporting is always hard, and of course, many things appear obvious in hindsight!
I wonder if the "investigators" were subconsciously not that interested in actually solving the mystery, but were just enjoying the process. Can't remember what it was I was reading recently, but there was a character who deliberately did things the hard way, or in a convoluted way, because it satisfied something inside of him.
Edit: It was this article about an orchid collector: https://www.susanorlean.com/articles/orchid_fever.html
Have you seen Adaptation (2002)? It has a wildly meta, fictionalized/comedic portrayal of Susan Orlean's book and the creative process of screenplay writing
> I do feel a sense of achievement. We knew the photograph with Jack Nicholson in [it]. We knew that there was an unknown man, but we didn't know who he was.
Of course, this skips over the fact that it was actually a reddit poster who discovered the person, and the professor didn't believe him.
Actually no. In the audio file they discuss this. The redditor thought it was a misidentification and did not believe it, while the person researching it further did believe that was a good identification.
Yes, Connor discounted it, said it wasn't a match. It took looking at photos of Casani to nail it down and actually it was the injuries reported in his RAF file that confirmed it.
Which should be the default mode of operation with anything you read on Reddit these days.
I mean, discounting what Reddit has become in 2025, would you trust any anonymous post that said “I ran it through my facial recognition database and got a match from over 100 years ago”
It’s not true until it’s verified
> Which should be the default mode of operation with anything you read on Reddit these days.
Wide variance depending on subreddit - though, apart from the ferociously moderated exceptions, the large ones are all hopeless.
Where else can one reliably post and communicate on the internet today then?
Just because it can't be done or doesn't happen on reddit doesn't mean that it can be done or happens elsewhere.
Some place not run by a publisher with huge Chinese backing and millions of eyeballs? Like Fediverse, maybe? Fosstodon would be good for a lot of folks here. Just remember to not use the public timeline unless you're fine with 4chan levels of content, even on moderated stuff like fosstodon.
Good luck in this brave new world
Non lite version: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/the-shining-photo-ident...
Linking to the lite version of an article about an image is an odd choice as the lite version doesn't include images by default. Thanks for linking to the full page.
I really like the lite version - but then I used to work on an early version of the BBC website where pages over 70kb, including images, would make the ops team growl.
Not to mention the image the lite page load is compressed down to 33 kb!
For an even more detailed version https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/patrons-at-a-s... but it's overlayed (and still not full quality) unless you want to buy it there.
Sheesh, an instance where the "lite" version of the page is more annoying than the full version: an article about an image. Yes I realise I'm moaning about extra clicks to load the images..
The whole article reads like a complex mystery itself. Took a while to piece together what was even being investigated.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one experiencing some struggle comprehending this article.
> "[There were] lots of discussion about who he is and how strange he looks," said Spark.
It's cool how he's doing a tilted-axis / pulling-apart / creating-reality / as-above-so-below pose. Even if it's just coincidental for the original photo I doubt it's coincidental in why Kubrick chose it.
> Instead, Close had sourced the original photo from the BBC Hulton Photo Library in London, now part of Getty Images.
So the UK government privatized their photo archives at some point?
The BBC is a weird corporation created by royal charter. But it's not a part of the UK government, and nor are works created by the BBC copyright-free (as is the case in the US for something like NASA).
UK government publications aren't copyright-free either. In fact they manage to be worse than copyrighted, at least for works created before 1988 (some of which are perpetually copyrighted, others until 2040, others for 125 years, it's a big mess). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright#United_Kingdom
If anyone is interested, I'm the person who identified the man and found the photo.
Thanks, I thought the whole investigation was really interesting. Unfortunately discussion on HN tends to stop once the article is off the front page, but your responses here will be valuable for anyone who finds this while searching.
> Instead, Close had sourced the original photo from the BBC Hulton Photo Library in London, now part of Getty Images.
That's a bit disappointing if I am reading it correctly. A photo library initially funded by the taxpayers, is now locked down by Getty Images?
It was originally a private archive. The BBC acquired it in 1958 and then sold it the '80s. Getty Images acquired it in the '90s.
You can read more about it here:
How is a picture from 1921 where people were bustling around at night so sharp and clear?
It was taken on a wet plate camera (capturing images on sensitised glass pates), which has remarkable resolution, typically far beyond most smaller cameras even today.
The photo was artificially lit, most likely with flash powder or magnesium ribbon. Those create incredible amounts of light - obnoxiously so, which is why they were replaced by safer flash bulbs and later on electronic flash in subsequent decades.
The light would have been more than enough to illuminate the people standing and posing for the photograph in that enclosed room.
I wonder how different things would have been if we were not able to capture the past 100-150 years so well on monochrome film. What a remarkable time to be alive, and to have been able to look back on the past using a mostly-reliable and truthful medium - now long since lost with the advent of digital imaging.
Also, most of the people seem to have been posing for the shot, which means they would have been relatively still.
Flash photography was a thing then, this photograph looks like a Flash is illuminating it.
> through the 1920s, flash photography normally meant a professional photographer sprinkling powder into the trough of a T-shaped flash lamp, holding it aloft, then triggering a brief and (usually) harmless bit of pyrotechnics.
Maybe they used one of those big chemical flashes bounced against a wall to soften it.
Yes, it looks like a flash was used. A pyrotechnic "big chemical flash" was the standard kind in 1921, so that too.
I am not sure if it was "bounced against a wall to soften" or not, I don't think that our experience about what an electric flash looks like with and without bounce will apply, the pyrotechnic flash won't look exactly the same. The pyrotechnic won't be such a point light source for a start. So I wouldn't leap to the conclusion that there has to be a deliberate bounce.
From a balcony. I don't think Morey bounced it. Yes, magnesium powder I assume. No flashbulbs until a few years after 1921.
What a weird website. Why do I need to tap on every image like it was NSFW?
It is a "lite" version of the full website, that uses a minimum of data and computer resources.
Now that I see both pictures side by side, it's actually visible that the arms are in a slightly mismatched position compared to the suit in the retouched version
[dead]
only mystery is why people pretend to like or understand the ending with the picture.
I'm sorry to differ with you, sir, but I quite liked the ending.
If I may be so bold, sir.
If you don't mind my saying so, sir.
It's been a while since I've seen it, but isn't it just that he has been swallowed up by the house and now he's "at" the eternal party where he saw all the ghosts during that one scene?
The internet has sparked so many of these useless investigations, same with all those lost media forums, how many man hours were spent trying to find some obscure 1999 failed pilot for some Nickelodeon show no one’s watched. They stitched Jack Nicholson’s face over a photo of some guy from 1921. Who cares who the guy is? Are these people that bored? Is it some OCD tendency that every trivial detail in history should be logged and archived?
In a world of 8 billion people you will surely find someone interested in almost anything you can think up.
This is a distinctly western internet phenomenon. It’s decadence. There was a tweet or something that said these people 100 years ago would be chronicling every species of beetle in their local area or designing intricate alternate history about how roads would work in an anarcho-capitalist society. Now that’s autistic, but this is like on another level. Would this guy’s mom be proud he found the identity of the guy at some random party from 1921 who’s photo got stitched over with a picture of Jack Nicholson and included for a few frames at the end of the shining?
The Shining is one of the most heavily analyzed films of all time, for good reason. It's not just some random Michael Bay flick. It's really almost unbelievable how deep the rabbit hole goes, so no, it's not surprising in the very least that people would spend time on a detail like this. If people 100 years ago weren't doing this kind of thing with films, it's because they didn't have access to films the way we do today, if The Shining was around 100 years ago and people had home computers they could play it on and could download it easily over the internet, you can be sure people would be analyzing it like crazy back then too.
Yes, she would actually. And my partner is too. Next time you do anything original, do let me know.