JF Ptak Science Books: World War I Photography

WWI Snow Parade, 1917/1918

JF Ptak Science Books

• Original news photo service photographic image, 8x10 inches, ca. 1917/1918.  $500

This news photo service image--stamped "Hearst-Pathe News Agency" on the back--is frm the winter of 1917/1918 and shows a patriotic snow parade somewhere in the United States.  The snow looks prodigious, judging from the piles in the foreground and also the accumulated snow on the windowsills, and I imagine that all of the snow floats were sculpted mainly out of exiting snow in the street.  It is a delightful scene, to me, and hosts a variety of smaller, lovely images in vignette. For example:

The man in shadow and sleeping figure (boy) in the buggy complement the white-mustachioed bowler-wearing man to the left; the men looking on in the foreground are interesting, too--plus there's that laundry in the background.  Given that the laundry is out (and wasn't just left out during the storm) and that no one seems to be particularly bundled up against cold, I'm going to guess that there was a break in the weather that pushed the temperature higher than normal, with almost everyone taking advantage of the warm snap, as people do everywhere, all the time.  I also like the tiny American flag on the tall pole at left.

And so:

And again:

I'm not sure what the flag is on the side of the Dreadnought, and it seems as though someone has stoked a small smoking fire in the metal tubes functioning as the ship's smokestacks--a nice touch!

Also I like this quickly-produced oil painting version of the photo--I knew that there was a very nice overall composition to the image, but really couldn't find it until I did this:

German Soldier, Worn and Worked, November 18, 1918

It is unknown what this  photo depicts specifically but in general it sends an image of exhaustion and wear.  The caption for the image says that it shows "the condition of the Hun troops" and that the subject "Herr Professor" is learning "a good many things not hitheroto found in books".  Maybe he was a teacher, maybe not.  Macht nichts. His pants looks velour-like and his boots (if that's what his footwear was) look very thin.  He is ragged, his double-fold glasses look like they're at their limit, his face looks swollen behind his beard, and he just looks "done", in general. 

I'm not sure what he is doing, or where he is.  He may be trying to figure out local currency to purchase whatever it is the vendor-woman has on the tray at her hip--she os holding out her hand, and looking at his.  The soldier definitely has something there, and he looks basically too weary to comprehend it.  the hand language is ambiguous to me.  He may have received something already, some sort of food, and he is staring at it now, thinking perhaps how little of it there was.  He's eating, and already has taken a bite of whatever bread-like thing is in his left hand.  I'm not sure what attracted the attention  of the boy in the center--perhaps it is simply the camera, and he wanted to be in the shot. 

Original photograph, good condition, 5x8".  1918.  $300

There's a shadow in the foreground-left of what looks like someone making a photograph of the scene--probably not our photographer, but another, with a brownie or some such smaller camera.

At the end of years of fighting every general soldier deserves respect and, at least, some free food--I hope this guy got his.

And the accompanying text to the news photo service image, to be used if published:

Camouflage on the Belgian Front, 1918

• Item:  7x5 inch original photograph, 1918. Camouflage on the Belgian Front.  With original text.  Very good condition.  $125

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.