The War To End All Wars Shown As Never Before

This is an absolutely heart rending set of photos from World War I. Pictures from this war in general are rather scarce. Unlike the American Civil War, moving armies did not leave their dead behind them on a now quiet battlefield for photographers like T.H.O'Sullivan and Alexander Gardiner to commemorate the battle's aftermath. The trenches of Flanders were no place to try to take snapshots and darkrooms were seldom handy.

Nor were the powers at war in 1918 locked into the obsessive/compulsive overdocumentation in both pictures and text that they would be in World War II.

Not only are these very good pictures, they are also in color. The Lumiere brothers, inventors of the movie camera, also perfected one of the first viable color photgraphy processes, the Lumiere Autochrome. These were glass slides with the color dyes imbedded in grains of starch overtop of the light sensitive emulsion.

These autochromes were made by the French, probably by a professional, from the look of them, for some official archive, a commonplace cultural use of photography in France, dating back to the mid-19th century, and the earliest days of the medium.

Hat tip--Stephen Green on Vodkapundit.

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