WWI: Images of the Wasteland

The Atlantic’s Alan Taylor on the Great War

Alan Taylor is the editor of “In Focus”, The Atlantic’s blog on photography. This spring he introduced a massive series, comprising 400 and more photographs from World War I, that’s well worth an hour of your time.

It was spread out across ten thematic parts, and it bespoke an enormous amount of curatorial effort on Taylor’s part. The World War I photographs are as horrible as any current-events coverage he might post on “In Focus”, but they’re also weird. They have a mood; they are uncanny. You don’t know how to dismiss them, and so you can’t. Looking at the French priest blessing a prop plane in the mire, you have to ask, “What was he thinking?”

When I spoke to Taylor, he said that this was what had driven him to do more than a year’s worth of work on the series: the strangeness of these images, many of them found on postcards without much identifying information. They were printed for a world transfixed by the war that was tearing it apart. (The captions to the photos below are his.)

Soldiers of an Australian 4th Division field artillery brigade walk on a duckboard track laid across a muddy, shattered battlefield in Chateau Wood, near Hooge, Belgium, on October 29, 1917. This was during the Battle of Passchendaele, fought by British forces and their allies against Germany for control of territory near Ypres, Belgium. (James Francis Hurley/State Library of New South Wales)

This is Passchendaele, maybe the most hellish scene of the entire war. This was taken in 1917, after years of fighting at Ypres, by Frank Hurley, an Australian photographer and one of those actual adventurers the early twentieth century produced. (He was the cameraman during the long marooning of the Shackleton expedition to the South Pole, and managed to live until 1962.)

https://soundcloud.com/radioopensource/on-the-ruined-western-front

A German communications squad behind the Western front, setting up using a tandem bicycle power generator to power a light radio station in September of 1917. (National Archive/Official German Photograph of WWI)

Here is that blend of old and new worlds, consummated by ingenuity in the service of the fighting. Taylor also described an image of rockets tied with twine to the struts of a biplane. (It was an age before precision strikes.)

https://soundcloud.com/radioopensource/on-a-bike-generator

On the Western front, a group of captured Allied soldiers representing 8 nationalities: Anamite (Vietnamese), Tunisian, Senegalese, Sudanese, Russian, American, Portugese, and English. (National Archive/Official German Photograph of WWI)

This photograph has an ethnographic quality to it. It is a staged lineup of soldiers imprisoned by the Germans, and leaves no doubt about this being a world war.

https://soundcloud.com/radioopensource/on-a-lineup-of-prisoners

The British Aircraft Carrier HMS Argus. Converted from an ocean liner, the Argus could carry 15–18 aircraft. Commissioned at the very end of WWI, the Argus did not see any combat. The ship’s hull is painted in Dazzle camouflage. Dazzle camouflage was widely used during the war years, designed to make it difficult for an enemy to estimate the range, heading, or speed of a ship, and make it a harder target – especially as seen from a submarine’s periscope. (National World War I Museum, Kansas City, Missouri, USA)

Taylor, here, discusses a laughing interest in dazzle camouflage, thezebra-fication of warships briefly thought to confuse hostile forces about a vessel’s position, location, speed and structure.

Supposedly Pablo Picasso, on a harborside walk, identified the strategy as a rip-off of Cubism: “C’est nous qui avons fait ça.” It was abandoned by the end of World War II.

https://soundcloud.com/radioopensource/on-dazzle-camouflage

A Marine kisses a woman during a homecoming parade at the end of World War I, in 1919. (AP Photo)

Taylor ended his entire series with this image: different year, different peace, same kind of kiss.

https://soundcloud.com/radioopensource/on-an-armistice-kiss

Thanks to Alan Taylor of “In Focus” for his cooperation. Please check out his latest series on World War II, and keep up with one of the web’s best going concerns, here.