"My Wife and My Mother-in-Law" is a famous ambiguous image, which can be perceived either as a young woman or an old woman (the "wife" and the "mother-in-law", respectively). The young woman appears with her face turned away from the viewer while the old woman appears in profile, so the part of the drawing that represents the young woman's ear is the old woman's eye; the young woman's chin is the old woman's nose; and the young woman's choker is the old woman's mouth. [1]
American cartoonist William Ely Hill (1887–1962) published "My Wife and My Mother-in-Law" in Puck , an American humour magazine, on 6 November 1915, with the caption "They are both in this picture — Find them". [2] However, the oldest known form of this image is an 1888 German postcard. [3]
In 1930 Edwin Boring introduced the figure to psychologists in a paper titled "A new ambiguous figure", and it has since appeared in textbooks and experimental studies. [4] [5]
In visual perception, an optical illusion is an illusion caused by the visual system and characterized by a visual percept that arguably appears to differ from reality. Illusions come in a wide variety; their categorization is difficult because the underlying cause is often not clear but a classification proposed by Richard Gregory is useful as an orientation. According to that, there are three main classes: physical, physiological, and cognitive illusions, and in each class there are four kinds: Ambiguities, distortions, paradoxes, and fictions. A classical example for a physical distortion would be the apparent bending of a stick half immerged in water; an example for a physiological paradox is the motion aftereffect. An example for a physiological fiction is an afterimage. Three typical cognitive distortions are the Ponzo, Poggendorff, and Müller-Lyer illusion. Physical illusions are caused by the physical environment, e.g. by the optical properties of water. Physiological illusions arise in the eye or the visual pathway, e.g. from the effects of excessive stimulation of a specific receptor type. Cognitive visual illusions are the result of unconscious inferences and are perhaps those most widely known.
Baba Yaga is a character from Slavic folklore who has two opposite roles. In some motifs she is described as a repulsive and/or ferocious-looking old woman who fries and eats children, while in others she is a nice old woman, who helps out the hero. According to folklorist Vladimir Propp's folktale morphology, Baba Yaga commonly appears as either a donor or a villain, or may be altogether ambiguous. She is often associated with forest wildlife. Her distinctive traits are flying around in a mortar, wielding a pestle, and dwelling deep in the forest in a hut standing on chicken legs.
A femme fatale, sometimes called a maneater or vamp, is a stock character of a mysterious, beautiful, and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers, often leading them into compromising, deadly traps. She is an archetype of literature and art. Her ability to enchant, entice and hypnotize her victim with a spell was in the earliest stories seen as verging on supernatural; hence, the femme fatale today is still often described as having a power akin to an enchantress, seductress, witch, having power over men. Femmes fatales are typically villainous, or at least morally ambiguous, and always associated with a sense of mystification, and unease.
La Llorona is a Mexican vengeful ghost who is said to roam near bodies of water mourning her children who she drowned in a jealous rage after discovering her husband was cheating on her.
Hans Walter Conrad Veidt was a German actor. He attracted early attention for his roles in the films Different from the Others (1919), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and The Man Who Laughs (1928). After a successful career in German silent films, where he was one of the best-paid stars of UFA, Veidt and his new Jewish wife Ilona Prager left Germany in 1933 after the Nazis came to power. The couple settled in Britain, where he took citizenship in 1939. He appeared in many British films, including The Thief of Bagdad (1940), before emigrating to the United States around 1941, which led to his being cast in what may be his best remembered role as Major Strasser in Casablanca (1942). This was Veidt's last film role to be released during his lifetime.
Figure–ground organization is a type of perceptual grouping that is a vital necessity for recognizing objects through vision. In Gestalt psychology it is known as identifying a figure from the background. For example, black words on a printed paper are seen as the "figure", and the white sheet as the "background".
Ambiguous images or reversible figures are visual forms that create ambiguity by exploiting graphical similarities and other properties of visual system interpretation between two or more distinct image forms. These are famous for inducing the phenomenon of multistable perception. Multistable perception is the occurrence of an image being able to provide multiple, although stable, perceptions.
Ellen Craft (1826–1891) and William Craft were American abolitionists who were born into slavery in Macon, Georgia. They escaped to the Northern United States in December 1848 by traveling by train and steamboat, arriving in Philadelphia on Christmas Day. Ellen crossed the boundaries of race, class and gender by passing as a white planter with William posing as her personal servant. Their escape was widely publicized, making them among the most famous fugitive slaves in the United States. Abolitionists featured them in public lectures to gain support in the struggle to end the institution.
My Favorite Wife, released in the United Kingdom as My Favourite Wife, is a 1940 screwball comedy produced by Leo McCarey and directed by Garson Kanin.
Eye in the Sky is a science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, originally published in 1957.
Rubin's vase is a famous example of ambiguous or bi-stable two-dimensional forms developed around 1915 by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin.
Spirit photography is a type of photography whose primary goal is to capture images of ghosts and other spiritual entities, especially in ghost hunting. It dates back to the late 19th century. The end of the American Civil War and the mid-19th Century Spiritualism movement contributed greatly to the popularity of spirit photography. Photographers such as William Mumler and William Hope ran thriving businesses taking photos of people with their supposed dead relatives. Both were shown to be frauds, but "true believers", such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, refused to accept the evidence as proof of a hoax.
Leah Baird was an American actress and screenwriter.
Rutanya Alda is a Latvian-American actress. She began her career in the late 1960s, and went on to have supporting parts in The Deer Hunter (1978), Rocky II (1979), and Mommie Dearest (1981). She also appeared in a lead role in the horror films Amityville II: The Possession and Girls Nite Out.
Lilly Martin Spencer was one of the most popular and widely reproduced American female genre painters in the mid-nineteenth century. She primarily painted domestic scenes, paintings of women and children in a warm happy atmosphere, although over the course of her career she would also come to paint works of varying style and subject matter, including the portraits of famous individuals such as suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Although she did have an audience for her work, Spencer had difficulties earning a living as a professional painter and faced financial trouble for much of her adult life.
Sexting is sending, receiving, or forwarding sexually explicit messages, photographs, or videos, primarily between mobile phones. It may also include the use of a computer or any digital device. The term was first popularized early in the 21st century and is a portmanteau of sex and texting, where the latter is meant in the wide sense of sending a text possibly with images. Sexting is not an isolated phenomenon but one of many different types of sexual interaction in digital contexts that is related to sexual arousal.
Conjure Wife (1943) is a supernatural horror novel by American writer Fritz Leiber. Its premise is that witchcraft flourishes as an open secret among women. The story is told from the point of view of a small-town college professor who discovers that his wife is a witch.
The Goose Wife is a mythical female character that appears in tales from the Inuit and other ethnic groups that dwell across the circumpolar Arctic region. The usual story is that the geese alight on land, become women by taking off their goose-skins and bathe in a lake. However, they are unaware that a human hunter is spying on them, and he steals the goose-skin of one of them, forcing her to be his wife. Due to the great similarities between both characters, the goose wife has been compared to the swan maiden, another female that alternates between human and bird forms.
W.E. Hill was an American cartoonist and illustrator active in the first half of the 20th-century. He is best known for his weekly full-page illustration series "Among Us Mortals" published in the New York Tribune from 1916 to 1922, and for creating the most popular iteration of the optical illusion My Wife and My Mother-in-Law (1915).
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