JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 323
I wanted to return to a post for a few days ago on what victory looks
like in relation to the sub-war/Battle of the Somme in 1916,tying to
relate the staggering proportions of the 1.5 million casualties from
that action to a photograph of a group of people. This is not terribly
easy to do, especially without using images that are iconic standards
of “large crowds”, or even images that can be image-googled. I have
found two interesting images, though—one real, and the other, well, the
other one I made. (This is the only image of the 1200 images that I
have posted to this site that I have altered or created, just for the
record,)
The first image comes from the Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig),
for October 1910. It presumably shows the 12,000 employees emerging
from the factory of Continental Pneumatic Tires, only I make the crowd
out to be more like 40-50,000 That means that the casualties of the
Somme would be thirty (30) of these crowd scenes, end-to-end. 30.
The next image is a montaged photo, a photo of hats, taken about 12
feet off the ground or so, but a sea of hats that attaches faces to the
hats, unlike the sea of hats in the image above it. This is a sea of
faces, giving a better sense of humanity to the sea of bodies. There
are perhaps 500 people in this photo, meaning you’d need 300 of them to
illustrate the Somme casualties.
It all still pales in comparison to the actual numbers. Victory still looks not so victorious.
This number of 1.5 million casualties is probably an underestimate.
My mother had an uncle who fought at the Somme as well as other battles. He would not be counted among the 1.5 million casualties. He, however, suffered respiratory and psychological problems that were caused by the four years he spent in France.
Posted by: jasper | October 21, 2008 at 04:33 PM