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I've written a number of times on this blog about WWI images, many of which are in my own collection of News Service Photo Group images, like the one just below, which can be found here. Many of them are remarkable, astonishing even--especially those relating to soldiers whose war has ended, finding them as prisoners of war.  At least they weren't dead, like the dozens of millions of other soldiers.

 

(Original photograph available at our blog bookstore here.)

I uncovered another of these images, tonight, long misplaced.

Image:  black and white photo, 5x7 inches. Good condition.  $400.00

There were over 8 million soldiers taken prisoner during WWI, that in addition to the 21 million who were wounded and the 9.7 million killed:  38 million.  Plus 6.8 million civilians who were killed: 45 million.  And the numbers for civilians wounded are just, well, not reliable, as they were not really collected, or collectible.  At the end of it all, there were probably between 50 to 75 million soldiers and civilians killed or wounded or taken captive during the war...not including civilians who were killed by the hardships or starvation caused by the conflict.  Big, big numbers.

Some of these soldiers were taken in entire armies, surrenders of hundreds of thousands; and some came in pairs, or singles, as in the photo above.  There are two captured Germans here, the two men in the middle, who are flanked by a British soldier and (I think) a Canadian officer, with two locals in the background.  The short man front-and-center was paraded no doubt for his propaganda value--certainly not five feet tall, slender, with a tiny, not-average face.  The Tommy is certainly enjoying the situation, while the officer maintains composure. 

The photograph was made in 1918, a few months before the end of the war, but there was still fighting to be done, and the value of showing the the British and Allied publics the "face" of a now-wilting enemy must have been considerable.  There was considerable control and tightness over the sort of images allowed to be produced and published coming from the front line, photographs being made by a "pool" of news photographers the contents of which were closely evaluated by military censors before being allowed to circulate to newspapers and magazines.

Tree Rings of Soldiers' Clothes, 1918

ITEM:  Original news serivce photograph, 1918.  8x6 inches.  Good condition.  $250.00

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

 

Aside from the strong impact that this 1918 image makes, the enormous mounds of clothing of captured German solders that were routinely handled as part of their processing, it struck a deeper chord to an older image still (that we'll see below).  The photograph seems threatening to me, even though the action taking place in it wasn't, it was mundane--the men, who I believe are German POW's, are processing the clothing for disinfection and cleaning.  But the size of the mound reminds us of the magnitude of the numbers of the dozens of millions who were killed during WWI, as well as the millions who were taken prisoner.  What remains to be said about this image is how often that pile of clothing was replaced:  is it a monthly, or weekly, or daily pile?  My guess is that it was more daily than anything else, if for no other reason than there is an enormous oil lamp in the background of the photo, suggesting that the process went on all day and into the night.  My initial reaction is that this pile was replicated often during any given month....

 

And the image it reminds me of are those made of the enormous mounds of buffalo hides, piles readied for shipment away from the Plains by rail. 

I am in no way suggesting that the prisoner were skinned like the buffalo, not in any way.  But they do bear a resemblance in the way that thousands of men or buffalo could be represented in such a compact space, flattened husks of the living thing, gross representations of big numbers. 

Needles and Threads; Sewing in Battle, 1918.

ITEM: 7x5 inches, Western Newspaper Union.  Original photograph, Nopvember 1918.  $150

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1307

This fantastic photograph calls to mind the importance of the little things of battle--dry socks, headgear, water, food, scissors.  And of course a good coat in the winter--a good coat that can be kept closed to allow the body to stay warm, or dry.  I mentioned in a post here just yesterday that it was a small thing that may have led to the demise of Napoleon's army in Russia in 1812--the buttons on the overcoats of the soldiers were made of tin, and as tin becomes brittle in severe cold, it is conceivable that the buttons failed and therefore allowed the jackets to blow open much more easily than normal.  Little change that has an enormous impact.  

This photograph--an official French photo published by the Western Newspaper Union in November 1918--shows a group of French telegraphic soldiers, taking a break, and mending their clothes.  The original text for the photograph (below) points out that their uniforms were torn and made shabby by continuously running themselves up and down telegraph poles.  It is important to keep yourself fit and fed and your uniform in good order, so they calmly awaited the repair of their uniforms y the one man with a needle and thread. 

 

Art & Artists as Wartime Magi--Making Things Disappear, 1918.

Item:  7x5 inch orginal photogoraph, 1918. Camouflage on the Belgian Front.  WIth original text.  Very good condition.  $125

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1306

Its a little difficult to think of Ellsworth Kelly, Jacques Villon, Grant Wood, Laslo Moholy-Nagy and Thomas Hart Benton as painters-for-war.  But its true, and true for many of hundreds of other artists in the 1915-1918 era. Its not as though they were in the trenches gunning down the enemy or lobbing hand grenades into the swirling gunsmoke. They were camofleurs, camouflage¹ experts, artists employed as magicians, Wartime Magi, employed/drafted to make ships and such disappear. 

Ever since it was (sort of) first noticed in 1915 that designs odd to the environment, stark geometric patterns and such, were capable of fooling the eye, people with  design capacity were pressed into service, rendering offensive and defensive instruments of war optically semi-impervious with variations of the then-five-year-old modern nonrepresentational art. That must've been a very odd position to wake up to every morning. 

Of course the idea of camouflage in the animal world is probably 250 million years old--animals and insects have been blending into their environment for eons, and I'm sure too that early hominids did their fair share of walking behind brush.  But the idea of hiding great amalgamations of very heavy metal with paint is really quite modern.

In this photograph, the camouflage is more a more futuristic conception of art than the abstract and cubist approaches that were taken during the war, this looking more like assemblages of found material more than anything else.  And, according to the text that accompanied the photograph (which comes from 1918, from the Underwood & Underwood news photo service agency), the camouflage--empty sandbags thrown on a barbed wire fence) successfully concealed a gunnery emplacement for months on end. 

Notes

1. A fine bibliography on camouflage appears here, at Leonardo Online.

The definition of "camouflage" from the Oxford English Dictionary shows that it is a young word, in English:

(n) The disguising of any objects used in war, such as camps, guns, ships, by means of paint, smoke-screens, shrubbery, etc., in such a way as to conceal it from the enemy; also, the disguise used in this way; freq. attrib.

1917    Daily Mail 25 May 4/4   The act of hiding anything from your enemy is termed ‘camouflage’.

1917    Daily Mail 16 July 5/3   The King paid a visit to what is called a camouflage factory.

1922    C. E. Montague Disenchantment viii. 108   A French aerodrome across which the French camouflage painters had simply painted a great white high-road.

A Girl and Her Submarine, 1918

ITEM:  World War I news service photo, made 1918.  8x6 inches.  Good condition.  $250

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1299

I could hardly resist this 1918 image:  the young girl, the hands in her pockets, the ribbons on her chest, her submarine fashioned over a tricycle, the two flags (Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack).

The sun is low, rising or setting, and it is catching the girl in the face, the home-fashioned cardboard visor of her home-grown officer's headgear doing nohing to shade her eyes.  She's in her dress whites, maybe proud of someone else's handiwork on her ten foot long submarine. 

The image comes from a small archive of WWI  news service photos, this one no doubt intended to stir some home fires to help raise money or spirits.  I have no idea of the image was ever published. 

And of course the details:

And this of the stern flag, the Union Jack:

And this, with the hand-sewn eagle on the hand-made jacket, with all of the trimmings a creation of mom, or someone else as kind:

When a Portraits is Portraits: Found Portraits in a Group Photo, WWI, 1918

ITEM:  WWI News service photograph, 9x7 inches.  Original.  Good condition.  $225.

In my collection of WWI News Photo Service Agency photographs I would say that half or so of them show  scenes like this--semi-informal group portraits of military support groups.  500 portraits like this seem to be a lot, and I'm not sure why these images are so well represented. Except of course that there weren't that many images (overall) of active-battle scenes. 

[This image is available for purchase, here.]

These bakers, working at a front-line support station, from my read were probably taking a break, and the photographer took the opportunity to draw them together for the portrait.  I don't know why they're separated so, but they do look as though they have a real camaraderie--it is just a wonderful picture, full of friendship and loyalty, and I'm sure it has never been published before.  

Verticals and Lead-Spewing Gargoyles: Spires, Rifles, Bayonettes. Reims, November 27, 1918.

ITEM:  original photograph, 8x6 inches, printed 1918.  Good condition.  $350

Ref:  JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1267

Verticals and Anticipation after Four Grueling Years

In developing a history of vertical lines I thought that I would look at single vertical lines, but having just stumbled across this in our WWI News Photo Service archive, I just could not resist.  There is of course plenty of vertical arrangement here--just orders of magnitude more than what I was setting out to find.  So it goes.

(The image is available from our blog bookstore, here.) And the detail:

 And another:

I find this a soaring image, in its own odd way--this is a celebration scene, after,all, a decoration exercise, a military display of French forces that liberated the town of Reims, all taking place in front of the battered cathedral. Notre-Dame de Reims was the place of the coronation of French kings, and was a spectacular 13th century structure built on top of other buildings stretching back the site's inhabitation to at least the 5th century.  

But German artillery shelling caught the cathedral right at the beginning of the war and very nearly wrecked it.  The building was badly damaged by fire, a fire caused by the Germans, which spread along the scaffolding on the building which fed the wooden supports and superstructures, the flames finding its way throughout the building.  The fire was hot enough to melt the lead in the roof, which poured down as molten rain and out of the mouth-spouts of the building's gargoyles. 

As I brought out the further figures against the base of the cathedral one can clearly see the enormous stands of sandbags, the piles stacked up twenty feet or so behind the makeshift wooden fence.  IT was some sort of protection for the building, but not muc. 

This was yet another battle for the city, this one taking place 1550 years or so after the first, the Alemanni defending against the Romans; and then 104 years after the next major encounter, this between Napoleon and a Russian/Prussian force.  The liberating battle (the Battle of Reims, or the Second Battle of the Marne) took place 15 July 1918 to 6 August 1918, and it was a major failure for the German army, and spelled the collapse of the Spring Offensive, opening the door to the end of the war.  There were more than 135,000 Allies killed or wounded in this campaign (including 95,000 french troops), plus another 130,000 German troops.

The process of victory in front of the wounded church seems exhausting and exhilarating, bu tnot without a good sense of anticipation.

Odd Person Out--Large Crowds and the Singular Person in Photographs

1) The Composition of Relief and Happiness--Minus One.  Free France, 1918 . 

Original photograph, 8x6 inches, 1918.  Good condition,  $350

This remarkable photograph shows the joy and relief of the townspeople of Saudemont, France (20 kilometers south-east of Arras), after just having been freed from German occupation after four years of captivity. 

Saudemont had evidently suffered greatly over the four years, and seemed as though the population of the entire town was going ot be removed along with the Germans--but they weren't, and teh town was simply abandoned, found and recaptured by these Canadian forces.

The images of overwhelming joy are (almost) everywhere:

Except of course for the man at the fulcrum of the image (and the woman behind him), who remained, well, stolid:

But so far as everyone else is concerned:

(2) In this second photograph, taken of American troops at a ceremony at the cemetery of St. Marie, Havre, France in November 1918, the massive crowd (the largest funeral service held in France) is almost entirely focused on the proceedings--except this one serviceman in front, lathced onto the photographer.

Original photograph, printed 1918.  9x6 inches, good condition.  $250

(3)

Another extraordinary image of pressed-together humans, of a human sea, a carpet of hatted men.  And believe me, every person in this image of (I'd say) approximately 5000 men has got a hat on.  There are hundreds of folks in the photo who re aware of the photographer and who are looking right at the camera, but there is only *one* person who is lifting his hat to the photographer. 

Women in World War I--Rare Photographs, 1918, Part II

This is another in a series of posts on images from my News Service Photographs of WWI collection.  All thousand or so of them were made in the last half of 1918, in the last months of the grueling conflict, and were intended to be used by newspaper and magazines to illustrate stories about the war. An editor would send off a request to one of these agencies for, say, a photograph of marching American nurses, and the agency would send one back (for a fee) along with a caption.   There's really no way for me to determine if these photos were ever published, and there is never an attribution for the photographer. 

Most of the images have an accompanying descriptive text--this was to be used by whomever published the photograph, along with the attribution for the source of the photo. 

In almost every case I supplied a detail of the image, hopefully of something that you'd want to see a detail of. 

ORIGINAL photograph, 1918. 8x5 inches.  Ushers at ballpark, 1918. Very good conditon.  $150

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918.  8x6 inches.  Very good condition.  $150

 
ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918. 8x6 inches.  BVery good condition.  $150

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918.  8x6 inches.  Very good condition.  $150

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918.The only woman in the French Army.  $200

ORIGINAL photograph, 1918. King and Queen of England at Munitions Factory. 8x6 inches.  Good condition.  $125

The detail comes from the sweeping woman at right, taking care of some debris in a munitions factory in October 1918, sweeping as the King and Queen of England stroll by on a visit/inspection.  I suspect she was instructed to say nothing and to not look up from her work.  She doesn't look nervous to me, though--her hands aren't tightly gripped around the broom handle, and her face looks relaxed...

 

 

ORIGINAL Phoptograph, 8x6 inchces, 1918.  Good condition.  $300

WRAF in track and field exercises, Kent.  This is the third-place finisher, running while leaning back, trying to keep everything in place, mouth closed, arms down--pretty good results from such an awkward and highly-mannered style of running.  Also, the woman to her right is a dead-ringer for Alan Turing (if you've ever seen the Enigma Man running at track, I think you'd have to agree.)

The great Alan Turing

The full image of the race:

 

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918.  Steno pool.  7x5 inches.  $125

I just liked this woman from the typing/steno pool.

 

 

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918. 7x5 inches.  $100

 

Detail of the image of the Forestry Corps of the Women's Land Army of England, working at cutting telegraph poles on some great-looking draught horses.  (The horse on the right--ears back--looks big and unhappy.)  I love that this woman is wearing a tie.

 

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918, 8x5 inches.  $125

 

ORIGINAL Photograph, 7x5 inches, 1919.  $75

Detail from "Soldiers' children being care for by volunteer nurses, Berlin, June 19, 1919".

  xcxc

 

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918. Nurse.  Dissected photo, background removed, excised for publication.  A very interesting image in spite of all faults.  $75

 

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918--American actress entertains the troops.  $125

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918.  British women at work in glass factory.  8x5 inches.  Good condition.  $125

 

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918.  Workers in Italy.  *x5 inches.  Good condition.  $125

 

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918.  Children getting school instruction in wine cellar, Rheims.  8x6 inches.  Good condition.  $125

 

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918.WOmen folding in the Pants Kingdom.  8x6 inches, good condition. $150

 

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918. American Red Cross in France.  7x5 inches. Very good condition.  $75

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918. AMerican YWCA entertainers, France.  7x5 inches.  Good condition.  $75

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918. 7x5 inches, good condition.  $75

 

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918.  7x5 inches, good condition. $75

 

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918.  7x5 inches, very good condition.  $95

ORIGINAL Photograph. 1918.  Size 7x5 inches.  Very good condition.  $75

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918.  7x5 inches.  Very good condition.  $135

 

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918.

World War I Photographs--German Prisoners, Mass Scene, 1918

Original photograph, printed 1918. 9x6 inches.  Good condition. $150

This image comes from a collection here of First World War news service photographs,  showing German prisoners being readied for transport home, and dated 20 November 1918.  This group had evidently surrendered just before the armistice was signed, and was sent directly and instantly  to a staging area for transport back to the Fatherland.  The way that many newspapers obtained the war images that they published in their papers was via a semi-centralized pool of war images.  The newspaper would request, say, a photo of German prisoners, and would contact one of these photographic agencies—in this particular case, it was the Central News Photo Service of 26-28 Beaver Street, NYC—and purchase the rights for republication, and then print it in the newspaper along with the story.  In almost every case the photo would be accompanied by a caption mimeographed onto an attached piece of cheap paper, and in this case it reads:  “Waiting to Return Home/a photo just received showing a batch of enemy troops who surrendered just before the signing of the armistice, joyously discussing the coming of peace and the opportunity of returning home to their families.”

I seriously doubt that the copy editor could read the minds of either the photographer or the troops in the photo.  I would imagine that they were definitely joyous about going home ALIVE to their families, but when looking really closely at the picture the thing that seems to dominate the actions of the people is food.  Or cigarettes.  But mostly when looking hard at the faces in the photo, the men just look tired.

Looking very closely at these types of images has always been fascinating; look close enough, under high magnification, and the large photo becomes composed of dozens of smaller photos.  The whole is an assemblage of vignettes, each in themselves a work of art.

Continuing in a more odd tone, I’m also reasonably convinced that after looking at hundreds of faces in a photo like this that you’ll find a picture of yourself.

I did.  This section is a 3200 dpi scan of a 15x10 mm section, and I am undoubtedly and unquestionably the bald bearded man (one of the few people in the image without a hat) at center-bottom.