The following is excerpted from my essay, Slouching Towards Emmaus;
In 1994, Dr. Emily A. Craig and Dr. Randall R. Bresee, a couple of University of Tennessee forensic researchers, published a paper, “Image Formation and the Shroud of Turin” in the prestigious Journal of Imaging Science and Technology (Volume 34, Number 1, 1994). Quoting from the abstract:
Both the first written historical record and modern radiocarbon analysis date the cloth known as the shroud of Turin to the 13th or 14th century. Interestingly, many people have remained convinced that the cloth was used as the burial shroud of Jesus and thus must be approximately 2000 years old. The primary reason usually cited for this belief is the inability of scientists to explain how a 13th or 14th century artist could have created the image on the cloth that is continuous tone, exhibits fine detail without brush strokes, is a negative image, and accurately represents an abundance of three-dimensional information. In this paper, we will show how the carbon dust drawing technique used by medical illustrators can be modified to produce images exhibiting numerous features of the Turin cloth.
And they did. As Al Adler stated:
Craig and Bresee have described a dry powder transfer technique that appears to give acceptable VP-8 characteristics. This sounds satisfactory until one discovers they are actually making the copy from an image of the Shroud face itself. The question then becomes where did the artist get the original from which to make the copy.
Chemically, and in many other ways, Craig and Bresee did not succeed in replicating the Shroud’s image. But the point that must be made here is that once again, the notion that the Shroud’s 3D characteristics are unique is demonstrably false. It doesn’t matter if they were copying the Shroud’s image. They weren’t trying to make an exact copy. They were doing what forensic scientists do, looking for a way that might work. With dust and daubing brushes and quite a bit of stylistic freedom, they created a picture with 3D characteristics.
Lee Jones, who was paying attention to social media commentaries on the Shroud, decided to confirm this by plotting Craig and Bressee’s image. Craig and Bressee called their proposed method a carbon dust drawing. Adler had referred to it as dry powder transfer. Artists sometimes call the process daubing. Take a daubing brush and apply some dry pigment. It is the primary method for applying cosmetic powder to one’s face. I can fully imagine creating an image like Craig and Bressee’s by copying a real person’s face. Lee Jones, with a few clicks of a mouse, showed us that Craig and Bressee – and Accetta – were right.
Spectacularly right.
Adler’s attempt to run down C&B’s dust painting is ridiculous. If anything the green face from the VP8 is minimally 3D while the plot of C&B is impressive. Some copying. Who claimed 3D data encoded into the image actually eliminates photography and painting? Were there no image specialists in STURP?
First of all, Barrie has wisely and generously posted a lengthy comments page with reactions to Craig and Bresee’s work product. It should be read at https://www.shroud.com/comment2.htm
For instance, consider this item: “John Jackson has emphasized in every presentation of his discoveries on the Turin cloth that the darker image areas are not the product of darker color, but of more fibers in those areas being equally faintly stained. He emphasizes that microscopically one can see non-stained fibrils (not fibers) adjacent to stained fibrils in lighter image areas.”
Does anybody really notice?
The problem is in the way the public sees things. Untold numbers of books, PowerPoints, PDFs, and magazine articles such as the one in the National Catholic Review pedal the message that “This spatial data encoded into the image actually eliminates photography and painting as the possible mechanism for its creation and allows us to conclude that the image was formed while the cloth was draped over an actual human body.” Without pages and pages of declamatory text,the message is gibberish. If anything, because it is careless, it hurts the case for authenticity, as some see it; truth as others see it.
The ‘monochrome’ discussion is one of the most convincing evidences that the STuRP team really had very little idea of what ‘art’ was. It has been an act of faith (since before 1978, I think), that image intensity is not due to the use of lighter and darker pigments or discolouration, but only to the relative proportion of coloured to uncoloured fibrils visible on the surface of the Shroud. Actually I don’t think that’s true, but it led to various ‘experts,’ (mostly in nuclear physics or porphyrin chemistry) claiming that an artist would have had to have a brush a tenth of a mllimeter thick painting individual fibres to achieve his effect.
What nonsense. A tub of one colour of paint, red ochre, say, or carbon powder, or just a pencil, does not have a range of intensities for the artist to choose from, his monochrome painting is lighter or darker exactly because the dispersal of the chromophore colours some places but not others, just as is claimed for the Shroud. In truth, if the intensity of the image really were only related to the proportions of light to dark fibres, that would speak strongly in favour of a pigmented image, because the intensity of the colour of the pigment is fixed, and strongly against any radiation or chemical damage to the chemistry of the Shroud, where the intensity of the colour at any one point depends on the intensity of the radiation/vapours contacting it, which only depends, so we’re told, on the distance of the body from the cloth.
It’s truly amazing anyone still entertains a man made image. It’s a very good photographic negative and the third dimension transfers to the photo. Anyone can see that with their own eyes. To say the Image is remarkable is possibly one of the biggest understatements of all time.
All previous data precludes a man made image.
Hi Chuck!
I’m sorry to be one of those who truly amazes you. When you say the Shroud is a “very good” photographic negative, I wonder if you’d care to specify some parameters. My hair, eyebrows, lips and bruises (when I have them) are darker than my skin, but on the Shroud negative (which you imply is a “very good” positive) they appear much lighter. A negative of my face shows the lines on my cheeks, nasolabial folds, for example and the creases under my eyes, but the Shroud lacks sufficient resolution to show anything of the kind. I can see this with my own eyes. Would you care to elaborate on what you understand by “a very good photographic negative”?