ITEM: original news photo service photograph, Underwood & Underwood, July 1918, with original paper caption text. 8x6 inches, very good condition. $225.00
This news photo service image (available from our blog bookstore) shows the action in "one of the busiest military centers on the British Western Front in France", with a British soldier using a traffic semaphore to take care of the hustle and bustle. The caption--almost always supplied with these photos as they were made by a pool of uncredited photographers covering the war for a consortium of newspapers and paid subscribers providing images and content for paying media--reads that the picture "might well be taken for an everyday scene on Fifth Avenue, New York, if it weren't for the landscaping and the costumes".
Indeed. Actually, if you removed the landscaping, the vehicles, the background and the uniforms (clearly whoever wrote this copy had no feel for the fact that actors wear "costumes" and soldiers wear "uniforms"), and replaced it with paved roads, buildings on all sides, crowds of people and packed it all with automobiles and placed the scene on Fifth Avenue, then the scene would have looked like Fifth Avenue.
On the other hand, even if it were never to look at all like Fifth Avenue this intersection would have been exceptionally busy from time to time; I'm sure it could have seen thousands of troops per day, particularly since the Brits fielded probably a million troops in this region alone, and those troops needed to be fed and cared for, which means there would've been a constant flow of people, and machines, and materiel.
This is a fantastic photograph,though, though the captioning folks did it little justice.
I can't quite make out the BEF-made sign in the background, placed for the use of the troops.
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