(1) Me — during work hours. Just came up for a breath of air. |
(2) It’s me again. Actually working! See, I told you so! |
(3) Here I am still working. I don’t know how I can work so hard!! |
The above photos (taken somewhere in France, sometime in 1944), their captions penned in ink on the back, the handwriting in which the captions appear, and the voice in which I can hear the captions spoken — all are exquisitely familiar and completely alien to me. And I bet they are to some of you, too, even if the faces, places, and years are different.
Thanks, Dad.
cuff says
Thanks for sharing the photos. It’s hard for me in this era to imagine the mass mobilization that the world wars required — both on the part of the soldiers, sailors, etc. themselves and on the homefront, with rationing etc. On a daily basis, as far as our civilian lifestyles are concerned, we’d hardly know we were at war now.
marta says
I tend to think most photos are alien and familiar at the same time. But they make me wonder how people perceived the world before photography and film.
John says
cuff: That is what I was thinking as I looked at these pix. Dad was a mechanic in an armored division — not one of the more glamorous roles depicted in combat movies. But there had to be thousands, tens of thousands of mechanics — not to mention cooks, accountants, and all the rest whose jobs at war involved weapons last of all the tools available to them. Boggles the mind.
marta: When you go back and look at really old photos, like daguerrotypes and such, one of the emotions pretty obviously underlying the faces of the subjects is: This is NOT something that people like me do every day. And because they had to sit motionless, lest the image blur, it only heightened the sense of unreality. They knew it was strange.
In a child-psych class once, the instructor told us that children are not born with the ability to extrapolate a three-dimensional scene from a two-dimensional swirl of color, let alone shades of gray. What happens at the threshold between that inability and — when it comes — that ability has to be one of the most wonderful unremarked mysteries of being human. I don’t much like grand sweeping generalities like that, but this one seems to work for me.
cuff says
We’ve become even more immune to the mystic effects of photography now that digital imaging is so prevalent — you just whip out your phone to snap the moment, and regular digital cameras can store several hundred images no problem, so pictures are cheap. That’s probably one major difference in documentation between WWII and the current Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
John says
cuff: somewhere recently I read… wait, was it on your blog? yeah, it was! — the post about Doris Lessing’s letters — ANYWAY, it was about the transience of hardcopy. In the photos above, notice the pretty bad quality; they’re actually manipulated to be crisper and clearer than the originals, which have faded quite a bit and may not have been that great to start with.
More demystification, then: the ten jillion pictures being taken right now will NEVER look old.
The Missus and I were at the zoo in DC a few months ago. A guy in the primate house wasn’t even watching the apes. Rather, he was talking to an adult next to him. But he had his cell phone held high and wasn’t even looking at the screen as he shot frame after flash-lit frame of an orangutan. Very strange experience.