These wouldn't count as rare as today he is a rather widely known photographer, but Wikimedia has a large collection of colour photographs from Alfred Palmer, mostly taken from 1941 to 1943 for the American Office of War Information. While effectively propaganda in nature, they're undeniably beautiful photographs.
If one can, I urge visiting one of these camps. You'll see many such photos on display. But for me it took feeling the brutal heat of the surrounding desert in Manzanar. There is no shade, no AC. In the summer, it gets up to 110º. In the winter, it barely breaks 40º. In every photo you'll see a cloud of fine dust on the ground. It hurts.
And the US jailed more than 120,000 Japanese Americans there.
Photographs by them and others are displayed at the Manzanar National Historic Site. Both the web site and the physical site are worth visiting.
What all of the photographers had in common was a desire to show some kind of truth, and an inability to avoid restrictions from the authorities in the pursuit of that truth. What we are left with is a valuable resource to help us understand the camp experience. Although these artists were censored and manipulated, they provide for us today a concrete record of a time when American citizens were held behind barbed wire without due process of law. For that we are grateful.
> These wouldn't count as rare as today he is a rather widely known photographer, but Wikimedia has a large collection of colour photographs from Alfred Palmer, mostly taken from 1941 to 1943 for the American Office of War Information.
> While effectively propaganda in nature, they're undeniably beautiful photographs.
It's worth noting that the DOD collects all sorts of media and pictures from war and battle. What's sent out to the public is curated for a number of reasons.
Having dabbled in film photography during high school and college, I'm amazed at the quality of these images and also being in color. The processing for color was much more difficult (last I checked) since you couldn't prep the paper like you can with black and white using a red filter.
I like pics like the one in Cologne [1] because I try to find them on Google street view.
The alignment of the spires in the original makes me think it's either taken from the north or south.
- Here's a current view from the north [2].
- Here's a view from the south [3].
My guess is that it's from the south and in approximately the same location as [3]. Without going too much further down the rabbit hole, I'm assuming:
- The Allies approached the city from the south.
- The original pic doesn't show the train station, which I don't think was destroyed during the war.
- The buildings in the original look ruined and the street view has all post-war buildings.
If anyone is a better lunchtime detective, happy to be corrected! And if you could help me figure out who is in the portrait in the foreground, that would be much appreciated!
Thanks for posting the archive link. More than down, I get a message saying that the account has been suspended. Perhaps they hit some sort of usage limit with all the extra traffic?
I find them surprisingly chilling and not just the ones taken at the concentration camp. The US troops preparing for D-Day, the bombs lined up on the battleship. The solder writing the name of his fallen friend on a bomb. The flamethrower, firing at an empty field but how long before Soviet solders are on the other end?
Death hangs like a cloud over these photos. I wonder how many of the subjects made it through the war alive.
> I wonder how many of the subjects made it through the war alive.
Those D-Day soldiers, especially.
WWII photos are among most harrowing and iconic images in human history.
The technology is right on the line between old and modern. You can easily imagine yourself there with the tinny radios and the smell oil and grease. The planes and ships look scrappy, like they could easily be blown apart. Cranked out in volume to overpower the enemy, or at least have a few survive.
And then there's the suffering of people in the concentration camps, people who've had their cities bombed. Their faces tell you everything.
Unrelatedly was watching videos of Syria, and people there also have chill attitudes even though many parts of their cities are destroyed. War time is strange.
I went to a war simulation once--we played airsoft as "civilians" in a town where we stayed in open-air shacks, and "Russian" forces fought "NATO" forces with a mixture of airsoft and real blank fire. (Plenty of real combat veterans in "NATO" and "RUSFOR", but the "civilians" were mostly LARPers with a few veterans.
It was astonishing how quickly we reached a state of "bored adrenaline". By the second day, we were preparing our breakfast and not even looking outside when we heard (real) gunfire or airsoft pellets striking our shack. I remember sitting down, very tired and bored, thinking about nothing, but my hands still trembling from the adrenaline.
The ways that I naturally felt like moving (I think I'll lean on the wall of this shack for a while and watch the street, I think I'll lean against the wall and keep a hand on my gun) I eventually realized were the same poses I've seen civilians take in pictures of war zones.
> What a privilege to live in a stable part of the world!
It's no privilege: if these pictures show us one thing is that it was a hard earned right. These men paid the price. Freedom is never granted, it is earned.
What's funnier is people rediscovering this fact today, we went full circle aha
Modern phones have tiny sensors. Pre 50s camera had massive sensors. Sensor size does a lot, the larger the sensor the less optical performance you need from the lenses. It also helps a lot with the "3D pop" due to depth of field, the larger the sensor the more depth of field you get.
4x5 cameras from the last century out-resolve modern 150mpx sensors.
35mm film, which has the same area as modern "full frame" cameras was called 'miniature format" until fairly recently.
Digital still can't compete with film on any measure other than convenience.
A 150MP Bayer Matrix sensor would resolve about 7000 lines of vertical optical resolution.
I have some 35mm 50 ISO adox film here that can resolve about 600 lines per mm. That is about 21,000 lines of resolution. And there is better film which can do almost double that.
Nothing crazy about that, cameras used at the time had large film surface resulting in much high resolution than what your camera can ever hope to produce. Portable cameras (35mm style) became popular later.
Consider that most of these photographs were (probably) taken with a relatively large device that is cumbersome to set up and requires an absurd (by modern standards) amount of light to get a usable image. If you account for the "convenience" of modern digital photography, the difference is significantly less (though still real, in my opinion.)
Devices we have now that fit in our pockets can display a good photo almost instantly. Comparably sized modern cameras (digital medium format) given the same control of conditions (staging, access, models, lights, post-processing, etc) will certainly produce results comparable to, "better" than, or possibly indistinguishable from even the best of these older photos.
So does a CRT monitor. It can have better contrast, "unlimited" resolution and better colors. But LCDs are more practical. That's the same reason we picked up these subpar cameras.
> The images were commissioned by the British Ministry of Information, which got hold of a very small quantity of Kodachrome film.
My dad has images he shot going back to the 60s on a variety of films: Kodachrome, Ekatchrome, GAF, Agfachrome and Fujichrome. All stored the same. The Kodachromes look like new. Everything else deteriorated in one way or another.
Kodachrome is a very different process from other color films. (going from memory from years ago when I dabbled in color wet-chemistry darkroom work) Most color transparency films have color-couplers linking the silver salts to dyes that are in the unexposed film. Kodachrome, as I recall, had no dyes in it as shipped from the factory. Just three layers of silver salts with different wavelength-response curves. The archival color dyes were implanted into the emulsion at processing-time. The Kodachrome process is very complex and was never approachable for home darkroom work.
That’s correct. My dad owned a darkroom business/photoshop for years and we had a nice home darkroom. Kodachrome could only be developed by Kodak and I think one independent business that bought the necessary equipment from Kodak as they were winding down Kodachrome:
Kodak simplified the Kodachrome development process over the years, but it was never viable to do at home.
Honestly, anything but B&W and E6 was a PITA to do at home. Even the color negative process (C-41) was annoying at home due to the extra chemicals and temperatures required.
My dad took a lot of Kodachromes while flying during the Korean war. Those slides have held up very well, especially compared to my Ektachrome slides shot in the 70s and 80s. He once told me that many of his photos -- some taken out the window of his C-127 Globemaster, where he served as flight engineer -- would have been considered classified at the time.
Isn't "rarehistoricalphotos.com" one of those clickbait sites that I always see in news sites "Sponsored Links" sections?
A lot of those sites have modern photos that have had "antique" filters, applied. I love seeing "Wild West" photos, with pictures of women in modern makeup.
I had no idea there were original colour photos from the war. You often see images from this period re-coloured using modern image editing software or AI, but they never look convincing to me. These are fascinating.
He took 3 photos with different colour filters in succession and captured them on large glass plates. Naive alignment possible before digital technology limited the quality of results, but as original separate negatives survived - it was possible to scan them at high quality and properly align digitally. So now we can see those photos in true colour and high quality.
As one of examples a very vivid photo of Emir of Bukhara taken in 1911:
Note that the bulk of these are from the home front, or at least well behind the front lines. There is a reason. Colour film (the correct spelling as this is in the UK) was lower resolution than black and white. The depiction of colour was also not accurate enough to trust for intelligence purposes. So a photographer going anywhere with potential intelligence value would have carried and used black and white film. Colour film, as we see in the OP images, was for glamor shots. The photographers documenting the realities of war as it happened shot black and white.
Does anyone really think those women used lipstick like that while running a lathe? Makeup like that was saved tucked away in secret boxes for the day that the photographer came around.
Safety squints are a time honored tradition. Sometimes you just need to Send It. We have a guy on our fire department that lost a finger a few months ago. It's completely irrational, but I am jealous in a strange way.
Somehow when viewing really old movies, chronicles or photographs, I often think that all these people, some of them so youthful and beautiful, are now dead.
My dad fought in the Korean war. He had a camera, and took lots of color slides. I wonder why every documentary I see on the KW is all in black+white.
Another oddity. My family visited Berlin in 1969, and took several pictures of the Wall in its heyday. All with color slide film. Yet, if you look in the souvenir shops in Berlin today, all the photos of the Wall are black+white.
I look at that and wonder how they sourced all the CPUs and components... oh right, they probably had centralized domestic manufacturing and only imported raw materials.
Global Warming is going to trigger large scale wars, simply far too much disruption, including the likely displacement of a billion people or more.
Does anyone with knowledge of WW2 know if there was significant resistance to the victory in the months and years after "victory"?
It always strikes me as such a clear "victory" in a way I could not imagine in wars fought today. Is that just because the details of the end of the war have faded from general memory?
Entire German armies started surrendering before the German high command officially surrendered. It was different from most contemporary wars in that all sides were functional nation-states, with organized leadership, where the army generally was obedient to the upper leadership. When the leadership surrendered, the military stood down.
And no, despite that, it wasn't all that clean. Some German army divisions refused to surrender until early May 1945. There was sporadic resistance in the hills of Austria and in Yugoslavia until the end of May. In the East, Japanese holdouts, mostly in rural regions of the Philippines, Indonesia, etc., at the company level (dozens to hundreds of men) resisted in local pockets right into the 1950s, with the last guy not surrendering until 1974: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teruo_Nakamura
Psychologically speaking, both with Hitler's suicide and the Japanese emperor's announcement of surrender, people who lived through it often spoke of it like a spell being suddenly broken, all fervour evaporating in an instant, with intense tiredness and emptiness replacing it. They also spoke of relief. The leadership of the Axis had sworn that everyone would die to the last man if need be. And they had fought on long after the war was obviously lost. The surrender suddenly presented the possibility that people might just live. The fact that the Axis populations were starving and that the Americans started shipping in food, probably also helped convince people that it was better to not resist.
It's also hard to overstate the absolute scale of the purely military aspect of the victory and the occupation of the Axis territories. Nearly all infrastructure and military hardware had been destroyed. There were around 10 million Allied soldiers in Germany in April 1945 -- a ratio of about 1 occupying soldier to 7 German civilians. Meaningful and organized resistance seems impossible in the face of that. And the occupation troops did not leave until the Allies set up puppet governments that could and would crack down on any resistance to the new order.
Color makes photographs feel so much more relatable! These photos feel recent, and yet their complete lack of plastic or any recognizable electronic devices makes it a completely different world.
Colour film is quite rare on the German side as they were far more resource-constrained than the Allies, and they reserved their limited film stocks mostly for commercial films. Still, there's some. And for similar reasons, colour photography during the war from the Soviets and Japanese is extremely rare.
Even colour photography by the British, like here, is relatively uncommon compared to the enormous output of American photographers. America was the only place during most of the war where you could just walk into a shop and buy some decent colour film.
Ah, yes, the hallowed libertarian creed: "Pack the courts with theocrats so we can do what it takes to keep Those People from voting. And never mind all that free will stuff, there are babies being murdered!"
Everything you see in these photographs can happen again, and can happen here. It's not even political, really -- note the quotes from FDR in the Dorothea Lange link someone posted.
Don't tell me, tell your fellow travelers in the GQP. You're the one who claimed that "The right is more libertarian than ever," despite what we can all see happening every day in the news.
As for the evangelicals... man, that Goldwater fellow sure knew what he was talking about, didn't he?
Not really, photography was temporarily destroyed with the rise of digital. Everything that happened between the early 2000s to about mid 2010s was a step back compared to film in term of resolution and dynamic range. Even back in the 50s we had pretty good film and lenses already.
I shot this on a 1955 leica m3 with the lens it came out of the factory with on a fairly low quality consumer film: https://i.imgur.com/3VKMtra.jpg
I think a very good case can be made for the Nikon D3 outperforming film in every practical way in 2007, but it is striking that people have such a misapprehension of the resolution of 35mm film. Especially slow films like these.
Plus, most of the lens recipes that dominated the middle 20th century (and certainly dominated in compact cameras until the 1990s) were established by the start of WWII. The main difference between then and, say, 1980, is coatings for colour photography and flare reduction.
it is striking that people have such a misapprehension of the resolution of 35mm film
I agree with you. I've recently become a film nut, but I agree that modern high-end digital outperforms film hands down. That said, film is still great but a lot of people still think very poorly of it.
My suspicion is that in the time before digital and everyone shot on film, most people were just really bad at taking photos ~ people used 35mm point-and-shoot, disposable cameras, 110 cameras, and similar. The general population weren't photographers and weren't using film to it's full potential - as a result, they got tons and tons of bad photos. Modern digital cameras (including those in phones) have great auto features for proper exposure, etc... and it's easy to delete bad photos (out of focus, too dark, etc...). I'm inclined to believe that most people's poor opinion of film is conflating the medium (film vs digital) with the camera experience (manual & confusing vs automagic).
There was recently a post here on HN about how the internet killed bad photos [1]. I made a similar comment at the time [2].
Right. Most people's experience of film is cheap film, micro formats like 110 and disc film, fast film they needed for poor quality or disposable cameras, etc.
Then collectively our cultural experience of black and white film in particular is of photojournalism, and popular culture's long-term obsession with the allure of the grainy photo; grain suggests interpretations like "immediate", "thrilling", "illicit", "secretive", or "exposé", so it becomes the dominant experience of a film photograph.
These things add up to people not really understanding what film is capable of.
(edited because I mangled my argument with grammar)
My impression is that automatic exposure has also gotten a lot better, although it's been a long time since I've done film. Cameras have also gotten a lot better at shooting in low light.
Yep. Digital cameras allow the opportunity to use the entire sensor to analyse the scene for metering.
In DSLRs the metering improvement is largely due to high-res pattern/matrix metering (simplified scene recognition with a few hundred or a thousand metering cells in a grid).
These metering modes were also in the final run of great consumer film SLRs.But I suppose compared to the sales of digital cameras, relatively few people experienced this in the film era; film compact cameras were largely using centre-weighted metering cells, and many people incorrectly perceived SLR cameras as "difficult".
Read up about Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, if you want your mind blown. A Russian inventor hired by the Czar to photo-document the Empire, he worked 30 - 40 years before the photos in the article above. He developed a system of mirrors and filters to take three B&W photographs simultaneously in the red, green and blue spectrums.
Originally, displaying them was only possible with a projector that super-imposed the three images. But computer processing allows the reconstruction of his photographs: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Rgb-comp... (That is Alim Khan, direct descendant of Genghis Khan, last of the Mongol rulers. Is your head spinning yet?)
Yep. And I think people don't have a really good grasp of how little lens resolution really improved for almost 50 years. Many of the great lens recipes were a decade or more old by this point.
Plus, many 35mm films were quite high-resolution even then; the downside was they were all very slow. This form of Kodachrome was ASA 10 or 12 or something like that.
I currently have a roll of ISO 25 loaded in my camera right now (Rollei RPX 25) :-) I grew up shooting on film and preferred 400 over 800 speed film because of the film grain at 800 ~ the fact that my mirrorless can go up to 25600 and still look okay just blows my mind.
Kodachrome. They give us those nice bright colors. They give us the greens of summers. Makes you think all the world's a sunny day. I got a Nikon camera. I love to take a photograph. Too bad mama took my Kodachrome away. ~ I'm sad that I'll never actually get to shoot on it.
I shot a couple of rolls of K64; I'm sad that I never shot any K25.
That said my real "I wish I had..." are:
- I never printed anything with classic Centennial/Kentmere POP paper, and now nobody makes the stuff.
- I never shot any Agfa Scala (though Adox have brought something similar back)
I bought a darkroom enlarger to use the base + column as a copy stand, and I realised at that point that I would have to do some of my own printing, even just once, or I'd always feel that I'd missed out. Those few prints are among the most significant objects I own. And now I _know_ I will do it again.
Mirrorless is my day-to-day photography experience, though, with all sorts of adapted lens experiments.
I like the cut of your jib. A friend of mine just moved out of state and had to clear out his garage. He was giving stuff away and I sadly had to pass on the opportunity to get a nice enlarger for free -- I just don't have the space for a full blown dark room. The best I can do currently is develop negatives and throw them on my flatbed. Though, I'm eyeballing Ilford's Popup Darktoom kit. [1] I did some of my own prints in high school years ago, and it's a wonderful feeling.
Yes -- that popup darkroom is a design that was originally sold by Nova Darkroom in the UK, I think, about 15 years ago. It appears to be pretty good and I'm really impressed that Ilford have kept the price down. It's good to see it still around.
Edit: it's not, actually -- it's a little simpler than the Nova tent which is still in production:
A few of them are clearly 'live', and the concentration camp survivor holding a human bone may be "set up" but I can't see how that takes away from the impact.
It’s good to see pictures in color. In my mind World War 2 and before was all gray, black and white because all the pictures are that way. I remember when I visited Verdun and the WW1 battlefield there. I was pretty surprised how pretty the area was and not at all as grim as it looks in old pictures. Same with concentration camps. I visited Dachau in summer and it was also quite nice and not grim at all. I think we have a very distorted view of history because of videos and images are are seeing.
Same for Hitler. A lot of people envision him as this screaming maniac but there are some recordings of him in casual conversation and he had a quite pleasant way of talking.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alfred_T._Palmer
Some favourites:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Rosie_th...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Carpente...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/A-20_Hav...