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Friday, March 22, 2013

WW1 Photos


    For the last three or four months I have been collecting photos off the internet, mostly from Military Photos dot net. I have my own set of criteria for deciding which photos I will save, and which ones I ignore, and it amounts to some low percentage, less than ten percent, of the photos I see. Some of the photos I will post on this blog, but most of them just sit on the disk drive in my computer. Sometimes I will go back and look at some of them, but that is a haphazard activity. I am not sure why I am doing this. It is something I can do on autopilot. It doesn't require any great thinking, so I can do it when I wake up in the middle of the night.
    A couple of days ago I came across a treasure trove of WW1 era photos. Well, treasure might be the wrong word. There were a bunch of them, but they were all relatively small, which means low resolution. I spent several hours sorting through them, arranging them in rough categories. The largest category was Duplicates. Many of these were not identical files, but were the same picture in a slightly different size and with a different coloration. It was hard to choose which ones were better, I mean none of them were what you would call good quality. The next largest category was Destruction. These are the kind of photos I normally would not choose to save. Is any one pile of rubble any more interesting than another? Perhaps if you had seen the building before it was destroyed it might have some meaning. I only included them because I downloaded the whole batch all together, and they were part of the package. Plus they are old. History is important. This might be the only evidence that a church ever existed in the quaint little town of XYZ. It would be hard to prove from these photographs though, because few have any captions.
    After that it kind of breaks down. We have soldiers engaged in a multitude of activities, mostly pretty mundane. There were quite a few pictures of horses, not surprising since the motor car was just coming into its own. There are a fair number of portraits, both of individuals and groups. Some of the individual portraits were interesting. This is the best of the lot.

1 comment:

J.R.Shirley said...

In my experience, war is mud and blood. If the place wasn't muddy to begin with, it will be, once there's been enough fighting.