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Common Views of the Uncommon--Non-Combatant Photography in WWI

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There are many histories of photography in wartime:  early images show cavalry standing at the ready, troops marching, piles of munitions, heaps of food; later on (as late as WWI) come actual scenes during the course of battle.  War photography changes forever beginning in the Spanish Civil War, and then of course WWII. 
Korea, Vietnam, and then into the more recent past elevates the camera to being a third-person and fifth column.

Looking through the WWI years in the Illustrated London News I experienced a creeping realization of a different sort of perspective in war photography:  turning the camera to look behind the battle. 

Turning the camera exactly around, away from the action, hasn’t a good history in itself.  There are some great examples:  when the Golden Spike was driven at Promontory Point in 1869 someone had the foresight to look the other way and make a photo—it shows a vast plain, a long double ribbon of rail, a long series of telephone poles receding into the horizon, and one man. It is also a scene that looks pretty much the same today, if you took away the small dedication center that is there.  That was the reality of the day, not all of those RR workers gathered around the two hot locomotives, the cleanest of them toasting each other and the camera. (If you look closely you can find some Chinese laborers in among the crowd and also occasional bits of Confederate uniforms.)   Elsewhere in this blog I told the story of Ed Clark, the LIFE magazine photographer who wheeled his camera away from where the hundreds of other cameras were recording the removal of Franklin Roosevelt’s casket from Hot Springs and made perhaps the greatest photograph of the FDR years. 

But it is a different sort of turn-around that struck me for WWI.  These are the photographs of the liminal spaces after the fight, the clean up, the gathering of spent ammo, the cleaning of the clothing, the care of the soldiers, the rehabilitation. And I’m not talking about the Matthew Brady after-battle battlefield photograph style.  What I’m referring to is all of the “little” things that happen when the battles aren’t being fought and the troops weren’t on the move. There some images for thing that appeared in Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie and so on during the U.S. Civil War, but so far as I can tell the vast majority of them are drawings.  Having looked through popular illustrated magazines that covered the Franco-Prussian War, the Spanish American War and all of the conflicts in-between, I just don’t have much of a sense at all that this life was recorded very well photographically.

I can understand this—there’s not that much glory in sandbagging Red Cross stations, or hauling away dead horses by the thousands, or cooking thousands of loaves of bread in primitive conditions; they certainly aren’t a good case for a hearts-and-minds campaign.  The camera has enough power to go ‘round, giving and taking, usually at the same time. 

But to my brain these photographs really come into being in the second half of WWI., and they tell an other, integral, more human story of that same war.  The first image (above) shows two soldiers cleaning up cartridge cases after a fight—when you look closely at the photo you see that the place is littered with those cases.  I suspect that there were hundreds of millions of these cases ejected from rifles.  Billions, probably.  I wonder how long it would take a thousand soldiers to shovel a billion shells into canvas bags?  The picture reveals a very deep image of the ways of war at the most basic level. 

The next photo is a “simple” image of clothing out for a dry—except of course that the clothing lines go on and on, railroad tracks into the sun, tended by hundreds of women, getting the shirts ready for the “men in the trenches”,  many of whom won’t need those shirts by the end of the month. 

Many of these men and women wound up being consumed--this photo at right shows one of the ways how that happened. It is an extraordinary crater some 75 yards in circumference created by a massive shell.  It is a massive image--brutal, lonely, and speaking the quiet of the end.  And it was a different sort of image that people were used to seeing in war reporting. 

These three photos appeared on only three successive pages of the 15 October 1917 issue of the Illustrated London News.

French Visionary Architects--Boullee, Ledoux, Lequeu

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I've been collecting images by some of  the great, visionary architects of 18th century France:  Etienne Boullee (1728-1799), Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) and the semi-impossible Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1737-1825).  It was a tough time for these architects to see far into the future at the time of the Revolution, as people who were even less deserving than these men lost their heads.  In any event I've compiled a short three minute video exhibiting some of their works, using the music of Wim Mertens for Peter Greenaway's love poem to M. Boullee called The Belly of an Architect.  I couldn't but help using this music in this context, sorry to say--it just goes perfectly with these images.  (Also, I've written about M. Ledoux here.)

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Missing People: Flerov, Nuclear Fission, and the Development of the Bomb

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In the history of science there are a number of instances where discoveries get passed by, or un-noticed, or un- (or under-) appreciated.  Gregor Mendel’s 1865/6 paper embodying the discovery of genetics didn’t get noticed (for real) until 1899.  The Alpher-Gamow-Herman paper (1948) postulating the background radiation for the Big Bang went unnoticed even after Penzias and Wilson found it (by accident) right where it was supposed to be.  And so on.  There’s another whole category of names associated with discoveries that have faded into obscurity even though their idea has not:  Walter Pitts (neural networks), Vannevar Bush (the internet), Michael Servetus (pulmonary circulation, Rosalind Franklin (DNA), Robert Hooke (too much to mention), and so trippingly on.

I had this second category in mind while grazing through the year 1940 in the Physical Review.  I came across a very significant paper—a paper of exceptionally high standing, of direct interest to hundreds of working nuclear physicists—that, after publication, became invisible—or actually publicly invisible.  The problem was that it was also of very high interest to the war effort, and it was published by a Russian.  By a Soviet.  The paper was by G.N. Flerov and K.A. Petrzhak (Spontaneous fission of uranium  volume 58, page 89, 1940), and it addressed isotopes U-238, U-235 and U-234 and the influence of neutrons of different energies; their experiments revealed a new type of nuclear transmutation  and observed the world’s first occurrence of spontaneous fission.  And this of course was a big deal because of the military applications of the continuing series of discoveries on nuclear fission, and so the paper—as monumental as it was—passed without comment and without notice.  Not because the paper didn’t merit it, of course, but because the powers that be thought it most prudent not to tip the very secret developmental hand of creating an atomic bomb. 

Years later in his book The Advisers, Oppenheimer, Teller and the Superbomb, Herbert York recorded the thoughts of Igor Golovin, who supported the work of Kurchatov who sponsored the research of Flerov and Petrazhak:  “the complete lack of any American response to the subject of this discovery was one of the foundations which convinced the Soviets that the Americans were developing the bomb”.  As was everyone else,  probably.  Peter Kapitza, one of the greatest Russian physicists of the century noted (on 12 July 1941) that—based on this work— it was entirely possible that a bomb could be developed that could kill millions of people.  And it was right after this that these papers were no longer published in the Physical Review—for national security reasons. 

There was another reason for not responding to the Soviet paper.  On August 14, 1939, Josef Stalin started a letter so:

To the chancellor of the German Reich, Herr A. Hitler.

And finished it thus:

I thank you for your letter. I hope that the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact will mark a decisive turn for the better in the political relations between our two countries. .

J. Stalin

The Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact was a pretty good reason for not wanting to "share" with the Soviets.

The Soviets wouldn’t see the light until the Nazis ripped off the curtains with the start of their June 1941 offensive  in Operation Barbarossa, beginning a brutal attack on Mother Russia that wouldn’t end until the Germans where defeated by Winter.  Keeping the Soviets out of the loop was a good policy decision.

In a way though it may not have mattered.  The only country on earth that had the facilities and resources to develop the bomb was the United States--the sheer amount of energy alone would've consumed something like the majority of all energy resources needed to fight the conventional war for both the Japanese and the Germans.  This list goes well on, but that's another story. 

Outsider Logic Department: Earth Clocks, Ocean Spigots, and Mystery Exhausts

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Several years ago I purchased a very large collection of pamphlets of the Library of Congress.  It was all housed in 2400 blue document boxes, all the document boxes were labeled and neatly ordered.  The problem was that the classification scheme really didn’t relate to one thing in particular, and the judgment which set one pamphlet in a box wasn’t the same through and through—the alphabetization could have related to author or title or region or keyword or publisher.  In short, each box was an adventure—and a lovely, bizarre one at that.

It may be a unique one, too.  The one thing that really did hold this thing together as a collection was that the vast majority of the pamphlets were not located in any other libraries in any part of the world.  Now for many of them it was probably okay for the work to slip into a bliblio-singularity, but for thousands and thousands of others, it was a good save.

And here’s the larger rub:  as I classified and segregated the pamphlets into the “normal” areas of interest, I also started a pile of good-god-what-is-it pamphlets. The GGWII material was extraordinary—some had fantastic covers (and which many times was the most interesting thing about the publication), some had extreme titles, some had ludicrous subject matter, and some were just, well, bizarre.  As the GGWII pile grew into the low thousands, I started to box them for a rainy day project, because I frankly didn’t want to deal with them.  Some of the pamphlets’ covers/subject/title were rather mundane, pedestrian things when they were originally published; however, the high-winded sands of time ripped the flesh from this commonness, making them somewhat unapproachable, unknowable, and incredible.  This group I called The Naïve Surreal (a phrase that was coined, so far as I know, by Barry Stephen Alpert, the creator and editor of VORT  magazine and bookselling poet of the DC-Balto corridor).   A subset of this group are works that were not approachable and enveloped by their own unique needs from the day they were born; pamphlets made of the stuff of incomplete dreams and adventurous vocabulary—the Outsider Logic group. 

The Naïve Surreal has all manner of representatives:  pamphlets with just question marks or exclamation points as the title, or histories of unknown things, or beginning with “The Story of ______ “ [mud/zippers/a stone/a bubble/etc].  You get the picture.  The Outsider Logic pamphlets are really very difficult to categorize—perhaps that is their unintended  job.

Today’s emergent beauty from the Outsider Logic collection is .A. Alles Suggest theory The Clock of the Earth, printed in Pug, Pa., in 1935.  This pamphlet is only 18 pages long but I just couldn’t read it.

Here’s why:  the first sentence reads:

"The Clock of the Earth represents strange matter from inner-stellar space collected and compounded at the equator which accurately controls the revolutions of the seasons…"

It goes on but I just can’t type it out.  Sometimes there is a benefit to reading the Outsider Logic pamphlets, and sometimes the benefit is knowing the cover.

Mr. Alles’ cover is striking and deeply inscrutable, as you can see.  Somehow there is a system for the hour hand there at the equator, but it is mainly a secret, even though it is explained.  Why the geographic locations are printed in the white space surrounding the earth and connected to Addis Ababa, the Nile, Gizeh and the Great Petrified Forest and placed the way they are and connected to the equator clock will have to stand as art rather than explanation.

Most of the time superior, deeply-removed art like this cover is disappointed by the textual counterpart.  Mr. Alles may not disappoint with his writing, though.  He ends the book beginning the last paragraph with this:

“Four thousand years ago the open spigot on the equator at longitude thirty-one degrees east of Greenwich , flowing directly to the pyramids in Gizeh…. “ Then there’s something about “exhaust flow”.  Again, as I said, I just can’t penetrate this work.  I’m happy enough with the art, forever open to interpretation.

The Anatomy of Comparison Department: HMS Ships Firing On London, 1909

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HMS Ships Firing On  London, 1909, Old vs. New  Comparing Shipboard Firepower:  a Compelling Comparative Graphic Display from the Illustrated London News for 24 July 1909

Without looking at the sub-title and explanation of this of this print (“Firing from Thames Mouth to the Edge of Greater London”) its purpose might be a fair mystery, given the ships and the targets and all. The two large ships at bottom are a Dreadnaught Class battleship and a (smaller) King Edward Class ship, and, yes, they are firing towards London—but they are doing so to illustrate a point on modern weaponry and the vast, new superiorities of British advances in the death/protection arts.

In June 1667 during the Second Anglo-Dutch War the British were set upon by an running attack by the Dutch Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, who had advanced as far up and into the coast as the mouth of the Thames.  The Dutch advance up the Thames was repulsed, though their secondary targets (so to speak) at Gravesend
and the River Medway proved a scorching defeat for the British, and propelled the rocky war to a quick peace favorable to the Dutch. 

This image shows what could’ve been the results of that engagement at Gravesend had the Dutch fleet been outfitted with the HMS’ new 12-inch guns—de Ruyter would’ve been able to reach the outskirts of London from that position, and could’ve b=done so from a distance of 25 miles or so. Of course the artist and editor aren’t really suggesting a “what if” scenario to the course of events of the Second Dutch War—they were merely creating a very compelling, highly illustrative comparison from old to new firepower, and to perhaps quite some fears about the strength of the Navy as the unstable and rickety international system limped its way into WWI, just five years in the future. 

A Proficiency of Insult: a Biting Poem on the Medical Profession, 1736

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"For even they who compose treatises of medicine or natural philosophy in  verse are denominated poets…” Aristotle's Poetics [Translated by Thomas Twining, New York 1957]

Edward Baynard (1641-1719) of  London must have been a pinchy/gouty  physician.  Or not.  Perhaps he was an overdressed, deeply-dimpled fop.  Or perhaps he was skinnily invisible, a plain, vanishing custard of a man, scrupulously clean and who saved all money, deeply in love with his chambermaid, sleeping on a mattress of gold. 

But what he was a definite cynic, occasionally cranky to his own reaching profession.  His poem, Health, a Poem, Shewing How to Procure, Preserve and Restore It, was a best-selling book, reaching at least ten editions during his lifetime.   It evidently contained a number of frugal dispensations on achieving health, most of which involved  purging. Or sweating.  Or vomiting.  Such was the state of the art, much like our own when viewed from the year 2109.  (I overheard a conversation this morning in a hot dusty field, a physician saying that we would never simply ingest a plil that would render us a new liver.  Well.  How would the contemporaries of the newly discovered X-Ray have viewed the peek into the future of the “discovery” of DNA in 1953, only 59 years later?  And what about the enormous difference in the state of medicine and imaging capacities in the 56 years since then?  Phenomenal.  It would be nearly impossible to say what developments in medicine await the grandkids in their late years?  Or in 300 years?  Hypo-livers in Dixie  cups, I say.)

Returning to Dr. Baynard—he summarized the ten most important words and concepts in medicine in the second  poem of his book, as follows.  He held little in reserve.

“For some of the ten are always advised:

Piss, spew and spit

Perspiration and sweat

Purge, bleed and blister

Issues and clyster

These few enunciations

Cure all the doctor’s patients

If rightly applied

By a wise physic guide”

Indeed. 

[“Clyster” is an enema;  “an  ‘issue’ refers to the Galenic practice of creating an infection at some designated spot on the body because of the belief that some kind of ‘sympathy’ between the illness and the localized pool of pus would draw the illness out of the body”. ]

Strange Things in the Sky Department: the Alchemical Cosmology, 1618

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Well.  There's a simple ton of complexity going on in this difficult, famous print by the great Mathias Merian—its like a moving puzzle to me, complicated by the virtually changing size of its pieces.  There’s just too much in it that I don’t understand, too much archaeo-religico-alchemical bubbly going on for me to make much deep sense of it all.  I do like that it is all coming from the sky, though, which is why I’ve selected it for this continuing series

  

The engraving, Tabula Smaradina (“Emerald Tablet”) is Merian’s interpretation of the alchemical cosmology, a  schemata and representation of the order of things.  It appears (first) in Johann Daniel Mylius Tractatus III Seu Basilica Philosophica… (1618) and makes subsequent appearances in other works by the author, as well as in Lukas Jennis’ Musaeum Hermeticum (1625, see below). 

Basically, the Emerald Tablet shows the opening of a complex heaven and the delivering of the philosopher’s stone to the earth.  It is a magnificent effort and no doubt has a great power to alchemists, and I can understand only a bit and a piece here and there.  For example, in the bottom right, we see a couple of people holding a((n) eclipsed?) Moon, standing on the wings of an eagle which protects a double hemispheric representation of the constellations.  The figure on the right is a naked woman, who may well represent Luna:  her right breast is a star, and from her armpit is a streaming torrent of stars which comes close into contact with shrubs labeled with the astrological signs of the planets.  The cluster of grapes in her right hand and the stream that she is straddling must indicate a generation, or a birth, or rebirth, or time, or the universe.  Luna is connected via something to the heaven-element which in turn is connected on the left sign of the print to a man holding a sun, who I guess must be Sol.  Heaven and Earth, Brother Sun and Sister Moon, and so on.  From here it all gets away from me, no that it isn’t gone already.   

An Unusual View: Looking into the Past and the Future--St. Quentin, 1917

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This lovely, seemingly antique daguerreian view is what the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) commander General JJ Pershing saw at the front lines of St. Quentin in July 1917.  The U.S. had entered the war, finally, on April 2 1917, nearly three years after the war began, landing in France 13  June 1917 and entering almost immediately into battle at Chateau-Thierry.  On 2 July Pershing estimated that the U.S. would need a million fighting men; the day that this photo was published in The Illustrated London News, he revised that estimate to three million.  The view he was seeing here was more than of a town about to be pounded by thousands of artillery shells--the magazine was sharing a view of what the European and Empire countries had been seeing for 31 months, and what the Americans would now be sharing for another 17 months. 

It is a beautiful and deadly view, seen through French field binoculars at the tip of the front for the battle.  The large building to the right is the town's Gothic cathedral/collegiate masterpiece:  it was old and large, with a 370-foot-long and 130-foot-high nave.  It was a highpoint for that part of France, and was the burying place for St. Quentin and St. Victorious--their graves would be covered by the rubble of the cathedral's collapsed roof very soon after this picture was taken.  The building was shelled and burned all night long--the French blaming the Germans and vice versa. 

If Pershing had really good sight he might've been able to see the 116,000 American soldiers who would be killed in battle, though I suspect he had a pretty good idea of what was to come, thinking as he did that he need 3 million soldiers.  To be utterly fair I don't think that he could've possibly  seen in his imagination  what 9 million dead soldiers looked like, or what 16 million dead soldiers and civilians looked like, or what 37 million dead and wound soldiers and civilians looked like, all the casualties of this war, all done in 4 years. 

I've found it odd in a way that I've not really been able to explain that Pershing is buried so very close to Ira Hamilton Hayes at Arlington.  I used to leave a good twig on Jackson's headstone on Memorial Day, and then get that unusual, uncomfortable emotion on seeing the large Pershing monument just a few hundred feet away. 

Things Out Of Place Department: Ledoux's Architecture of Multiple Planets

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A Cosmology Seeded in Salt?

It  is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?--Sherlock Holmes

I've written a little earlier in this blog about the beautiful Claude-Nicolas-Ledoux  (1736 —1806) being the 18th century Marcel Duchamp (or vice versa).  I was struck by this image by the master--a depiction of the Earth nestled in clouds amongst other  planets in exceptionally close proximity.  There was evidently very little explanation to go along with this idea, except that it was inspired by his utopian plan for the saltworks of the factory-village at Chaux. On the face of it there seems to be no physical connection between the two--it must be the philosophical connection that Ledoux was thinking about.  From my point of view the idea for the city of Chaux was of course idealistic, perfect, communal, with a vast sense of fairness and correctness, and of great sensibility.  It was a "gathering of brothers" as Ledoux wrote, a city of lodges of workers, gathered together for mutual profit.

Perhaps this vision of cushioned planets was a larger expression by Ledoux of heavenly gratuity?

Anthony Vidler points out (in his book The Writing of the Walls) that Ledoux described his utopian Chaux as a "galaxy of...utopian forms" (page 101).  Since Ledoux also described the architect as the "delegate of the Creator", perhaps he reverse-engineered a cosmology describing a mutually beneficial community of planets from a community of brotherhood gathered around the (admittedly important in 1780) production of salt. 

Or perhaps not--this may just be way to simple and, well, just wrong.

NOTE:  I do just want to point out here (and discuss at another time) that Ledoux was by no means the first to describe multiple-world systems.  One of the prettiest of the earlier attempts, for example, belongs to Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle who published this delightful rendition of an extra solar-systemic galaxy in 1682 in his Entretriens sur la pluralite des mondes.  This sort of thinking was somewhat well-established by the time Ledoux offered his idea around the time of the turn of the 18th century.  

Should we not come to the rescue of a cosmic phenomenon  trying to reveal itself in a sea of errors?  Peter van  de Kamp (1983)

For a beautiful romp, have a look at Ledoux's L'Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l'art, des mœurs et de la législatio. I've included a short list of projects (with links) in the expanded reading section below. 

The Dot and the Sphere—the Depiction of Multiple Dimensions

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The History of Dots, Part 10.

Edwin Abbott’s slender Flatland is perhaps one of the best books ever written on perception and dimensions, a beautifully insightful book that was quick and sharp, and in spite of all that was also a best-seller.  Written in 1884 when Abbott was 46 (Abbott would live another 46 years and enjoy the book’s popular reception), it introduces the reader to a two dimensional world with a social structure in which the more sides of your object equals power and esteem.  Thus the lowest class would be a triangle (three sides) while the highest (priestly) class would be mega-polygons whose shape would approach a circle.  Abbott’s magistry comes in explaining to the three-dimensional reader what it was like to be in a two-dimensional world.

And to this world one day came an epochal event.

It was a dot.  The dot was a magnificent new thing to the 2-D world, and what happened was this—it grew concentrically and outwardly, expanding and then contracting in a series of circles, morphing until it appeared as an entirely new and revolutionary form rising from the plane of Flatland.   It became a sphere.

The sphere was from Spaceland and amazed the population of Flatland (Lineland, actually); the story was (and the book’s title page saying it was written by) a Square, whose deep interest was immediately enhanced by its great imagination.  It turns out that once every millennium the good folks of Spaceland visit Flatland to return one its  inhabitants home to try and introduce them, educate them, to the idea of added dimensions.  Safely in Spaceland,   the Square was presented with the radical newness of the third dimension, it engaged the Sphere about the possibilities of yet higher (fourth, fifth and sixth) dimensions.  The Sphere was not altogether please—talk of higher dimensions in the3-D world was outlawed just as the discussion of the 3-D world was in Flatland.  Pissed, the Sphere returns the Square home to its land of lines. 

The Square finds it very difficult to be home again. (Did I ever mention here that my house is about a thousand feet away from Thomas Wolfe’s grave?) It finds it a very tough go to convince anyone of its journey and the existence of another dimension.  To complicate things further, Abbott has the Square dream a remarkable thing—a visit to Pointland, a totally self-involved dimension consisting of one ruler, a Point, which exists across all area and things.  Even Square’s introduction of an idea or question comes to the Ruler of Pointland as an idea from its own head, because nothing and no one else exists.  Fantastic!

Eventually, things go badly for the Square—the edict is described making it illegal for any further discussion of the third dimension, with dire consequences on a sliding scale according to class./caste/sides, with death the penalty for the Triangle.  The Square itself winds up in prison, an unhappy being locked “in” a cell and prohibited in its mind. 

But Abbott is certainly successful in relating the possibilities of higher-dimension thought by introducing the view from a higher- to a lower-dimension.  Still, it’s a tough go. 

19 years later dots came to further assistance to a mathematician and military man named Esprit Pascal Jouffret*, who wrote a remarkable and beautiful geometry book on picturing the fourth

dimension.  Actually, the book was more an example of how to discus the representation of the fourth dimension on a piece of paper, and didn’t’ offer a comprehensive  treatise on the matter.  But the images of depicting space and time would look extraordinarily familiar in just a decade in the paintings of the Cubists.  For example, the morally-lonely Picasso’s 1910 portrait of the movement-molding art dealer Ambroise Vollard looks very much like many of the images in the Jouffret book.  Marcel Duchamp—for me the true

 

hero of early modernism—also drew on the work of Jouffret, and made no secrets about the path of his intellectual foundation (unlike the squirrely Picasso). 

And so from the lowly dot comes a beauty unsuspected in soliphismy Pointland.