Rare real colour photos of WWII (opens in new tab)

Dorethea Lange was working for the FSA and made work as Americans were rounded up for the crime of Japanese heritage.

https://anchoreditions.com/blog/dorothea-lange-censored-phot...

Her work was censored as part of the changed propaganda agenda from the we-are-all-citizens of Migrant Mother to ends-justify racism.

My favorite:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/B17F_-_W...

> 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.

The photos in the OP seem like a grab bag, they include some of those photos (like this one: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M-4_tank_crews_of_th...).

> 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.

Thanks for bringing those to my attention. Very beautiful indeed.

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 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.

The sense of foreboding is palpable.

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.

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.

Iphone vs full frame size: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-de59d641fcb2cb69218544...

full frame vs medium/large format size: https://www.quinnimages.com/wp-content/uploads/_mediavault/2...

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.

A modern phone put a "good enough" camera in everybodys pocket nearly overnight

Field of depth is, de facto, determined by the sensor size.

FoD is why SLR guys like me salivate over a 1.4 50 mm lens, not the added stop of light (especially not if you’re using digital - up the ISO)

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.

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.

Mm. The pre-E6 Agfa transparency film really is very unfortunately unstable; it had really beautiful colours but it fades.

"1883" stars a bleached blonde woman :-)

For another deep rabbit hole of true old colour photography, check Prokudin-Gorsky's photos of Russian Empire before WW1:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#Gallery

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:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Prokudin...

Color photography has been around for a long time, but wasn't practical until after the war.

But, consider all the color films from before the war. There must have been a color method for there to be a movie!

Now that you mention it. Ouch

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.

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.

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.

the one with the flamethrower seems to be a German soldier. Although, not the best picture

Due in part to Hugo Boss.

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

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?)

Lilacs: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Gorskii_...

Electrical generators: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Gorskii_...

Tea tax station: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Gorskii_...

Three generations: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Prokudin... (you can see colour errors here on the fringes of the clothing, due to timing being off with the 3 shutters of his photographic process because the subject moved!)

I've never seen the early 20th century in the same light since I discovered him. His works are all in the public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky

When you are next near a museum with a photography section, go and look at some Daguerrotypes and ambrotypes. The resolution will astonish you.

Why not? 35mm probably has a resolution equivalent of ~20MP.

In one of them there's literally an explosion happening. I suppose you could fake that for a photo, but it was the middle of a war?

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.

Why does it matter if they were set up or not?