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utopyr has just alerted me to flickr.com/commons as the link to, for now, only the public-domain color photographs in the Library of Congress from the 1930s and 1940s. (Plans are to link to other public-domain photo collections as soon as possible.)
They seem to start with vivid images of Farm Security Administration photographers' documentation of farms in the 1930s and (more or less) end with numerous shots of the construction of World War II bombers and transports at the Douglas and Boeing Aircraft plants, completely astounding color images of the process that I had no idea existed. (Which means that I probably have already read about the latter photos and not remembered it.)
Presumably Ken Burns appropriated all of these for "The War," which as usual I have not seen, but all the images on the relevant website show the black and white photos that are what we associate with the era.
I knew high-quality color photography from the 1930s existed (have seen some of the images by European photographers) but I had no idea this resource was sitting in the most obvious of places.
I am also struck by the extraordinary range of emotions the photos rouse in me, clearly because so many of the landscapes had not changed twenty and thirty years later but changed beyond recognition in subsequent decades. It would be interesting, but difficult to accomplish, to compare the emotional responses of those for whom the photos stir unrelated memories and those for whom they are a completely alien history. (This relates, vaguely, to the recent crowleycrow discussion of images and the different ways in which they can create unalloyed happiness...at least as far as the general question of emotional reaction is concerned.)
They seem to start with vivid images of Farm Security Administration photographers' documentation of farms in the 1930s and (more or less) end with numerous shots of the construction of World War II bombers and transports at the Douglas and Boeing Aircraft plants, completely astounding color images of the process that I had no idea existed. (Which means that I probably have already read about the latter photos and not remembered it.)
Presumably Ken Burns appropriated all of these for "The War," which as usual I have not seen, but all the images on the relevant website show the black and white photos that are what we associate with the era.
I knew high-quality color photography from the 1930s existed (have seen some of the images by European photographers) but I had no idea this resource was sitting in the most obvious of places.
I am also struck by the extraordinary range of emotions the photos rouse in me, clearly because so many of the landscapes had not changed twenty and thirty years later but changed beyond recognition in subsequent decades. It would be interesting, but difficult to accomplish, to compare the emotional responses of those for whom the photos stir unrelated memories and those for whom they are a completely alien history. (This relates, vaguely, to the recent crowleycrow discussion of images and the different ways in which they can create unalloyed happiness...at least as far as the general question of emotional reaction is concerned.)
