World War I - in color??

Wednesday, June 07, 2006 Filed in: Things I like, History

When we think of images of World War I, we think "black & white." But color photography, though in its infancy and quite expensive, did exist - and was used to capture images of the event and environs.

This site has a number of pictures taken by the French during the last two years of "The Great War." Wonderful slices of history, and rarely seen.

One of my favorites:

Pasted Graphic 77

This picture show Swiss soldiers standing guard at the border with France. Switzerland, as you know, was neutral during the war; images of their soldiers during that time period are a bit hard to find. To find one in color is a rare treat. (If you look carefully, you can tell that the picture was taken through the chicken wire that served to delineate the borderline.)

I must say that it's a bit unnerving to look through these images, and not because of gore or mayhem (there isn't any.) Black-and-white pictures are an abstraction, which is why photographers like to dabble in the medium. Color, on the other hand, is "real" - it is a record, where black-and-white is an interpretation. These pictures draw you in, and make the situations being captured on film a bit less theoretical. They are almost haunting...

-=[ Grant ]=-
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