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.

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.

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.

Depth of Field?