Over the last couple of days I have been looking through several books of WW2 photos for pictures of street scenes - mainly to take up a challenge on a forum to find three separate original photos of an ordinary street scene showing women wearing fur tippets, stoles or coats. I didn't find many - or at least not quite what I was looking for, but I did find a lot of other things to think about along the way.
So often, if we are not looking for something specific, we pass over the detail on photographs, glancing superficially at a stranger's face here, a house or cottage there, someone squinting in the sun, someone gazing clear-eyed and hopefully into the middle distance.
In some sections are the disturbing ones, those of dead people, people killed in battle, people killed by the evil that stalked the death camps, corpses in streets surrounded by the rubble of bombed buildings, the unthinkable, unspeakable irradiation of flesh and bone. In some ways we do not want to look, in others we want to study every detail, but feel guilty in doing so. Not because of the horror, and because of the horror. There is detachment from the deathmask of the stranger and a common bond of humanity- a sympathy, an anger.
They hide real death from us now in some weird paradox. Fantasies of death and violence are thrust at us in film and entertainment, yet the mainstream news censors the sensitive visuals.
With a few macabre, not to mention morbid thoughts as the Hallowe'en season makes a festival of the 'gone before'. I passed a Victorian terraced house on the way back from the Post Office today (well I actually passed loads of them- you can't walk in Harrogate where there are not Victorian terraced houses) and the small front garden was decorated (for want of a better word) with hardboard gothic 'gravestones' bearing the ubiquitous RIP in creepy letters. It gave me a bit of a shudder for probably different reasons that the light hearted ones intended by the commercial bonanza the 31st October engenders these days- perhaps imported from the USA. It got me wondering about how children can reconcile the death of a grandparent, or someone they know and love, with the distorted picture of graves and death and ghouls and ghosts promulgated by the whole Hallowe'en commercial bandwagon. It left me feeling rather uncomfortable.
When I was a child in the rural South of England, Hallowe'en tended to be about witches mostly, and merged into Bonfire night and the rituals of burning in order to cleanse so that there would be rebirth and fertility next year. It was All Soul's the day before All Saints, when we would remember the dead with respect. There does not seem to be much respect and remembrance for the dead in the modern frolics. The Remembrance of the dead theme seemed to carry on to 'Poppy Day' on November 11th, which of course had nothing to do with the silliness of superstition- or not overtly anyway- and everything to do with learning that every life means something, every life is precious and every name sacred.
Our Victorian Ancestors had, if not a fascination with death, at least it was treated as an inevitable part of life, where children were in contact with it and not spared the details, often sharing rooms if not beds with dying siblings. The family would gather around the bedside of a dying relative and the corpse would remain in the house to be viewed, touched and mourned by all and sundry. In the days before death certificates, this was also necessary to identify and to be sure that the person had really expired. Grief was regimented and had strict rituals, often with not only all the garments dyed black but with special jewelry - mourning rings, jet etc. Most children had touched a dead body by the time they were ten or so. There was no silliness, no scariness.
HARPER'S BAZAR: APRIL 17, 1886
http://www.victoriana.com/library/harpers/funeral.html
MOURNING AND FUNERAL USAGES
[Victorian Etiquette for Funerals]
http://www.victoriana.com/library/harpers/funeral.html
"What a comfort it is to possess the image of those who are removed from our sight. We may raise an image of them in our minds but that has not the tangibility of one we can see with our bodily eyes"
Flora A Windeyer in a letter to Rev. John Blomfield, November 1870
Post-mortem photography
Photographs of a deceased loved one served as substitutes and reminders of the loss. Families who could not afford to commission painted portraits could arrange for a photograph to be taken cheaply and quickly after a death. This was especially important where no photograph already existed. The invention of the Carte de Visite, which enabled multiple prints to be made from a single negative, meant that images could be sent to distant relatives. The deceased was commonly represented as though they were peacefully sleeping rather than dead, although at other times the body was posed to look alive.
At this site there are many Victorian photographs of dead people posed to look as if they are alive. You may not want to look, at least not with 21st century eyes. Somehow the dead posed as if they are alive is more chilling than the death masks of the shot, the hanged and the twisted corpses of the starved, diseased and tortured.
Victorian Book of the Dead
http://ame2.asu.edu/projects/haunted/ISA%20index/book%20of%20the%20dead/book%20of%20the%20dead%20photos.htm
One feels a little odd, voyeuristic looking at them, but that is from the standpoint of 2008, or maybe the values and attitudes one has accumulated from parents and the change in society since the War.
Victorian and Edwardian Photographs
http://www.users.waitrose.com/~victorianphoto/
Old Photographs can tell us a lot more than what people looked like, what they wore, how they posed for the camera, and later how they didn't. Frozen in time a moment can be read like a mind in living eyes.
By Stefan and Eva.
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hmmm
horror and atmosphere reduces today to the psycho with a axe/butcher knife chasing the big boobed blonde girl upstairs
accompanied by the sound of crunching pop corn
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this reminds me of when i had to handle a call in a funeral home...
dealing with the guy who made the dead all pretty like....
it was interesting because i thought of death and pictures and such... when i looked at the corpse all done up in makeup unfinished and how i wonder (growing up with both parents who were photographers) what this would look like through a lens -
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I am increasingly becoming interested in making pictures with the camera. I have arguments with a friend who reckons to be a photographer because he is only intersted in recording, I want to interpret the scene. He sees a totally different picture than I do, but I am beginning to understand how news photgrpahers can detach themselves from what is actually happening. At one time I might have thought taking such a photo in bad taste- now I am not so sure, but I still don't think I would dare.
Thanks for coming by Heidi. -
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some of the most powerful recordings in history are not pc so to speak lol..
i have a box from my father that i found in the trash when he was cleaning out some of his things... he never speaks of Korea but he was a photographer in the war. This box had tons of photos from Korea...
they were so violent...
he had a way of capturing a persons story through different body parts... sounds odd... but this one series of photos were of hands.. just dead peoples hands-- and when you look at them side by side... you can truely see the difference in their story-- what sort of life was led - or what i interpreted i guess....
that would have been lost on video... the image of the individual hands would have been skimmed over - while capturing them like he did- held them captive forever the way he wanted me to see them. He did other 'series' of shots I found but the hands were the most moving to me. He told me what he wanted, He paused me where he wanted, and he shielded me from what he wanted as well....
ohh i hope you do go into some photography... the way you write things--- your perspective would be fresh in photography.
I dont think my dad detatched himself... he i think always found it important to play the role of author through image.... i think that is why it is so painful and he never speaks of it... he can only voice through his images. It took me almost 40 years to understand that he wasnt being mean to me.. lol... but that his voice is through his photography. I realized that as well after i found boxes of photos of myself growing up through the years...
yes... you would be a wonderful photographer... well thats what i think
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Thank you so much for telling me about your father and his photogrpahs- that is precisely it, precisely how I want to do it- I know so little technically, but I see what I want to show and how I want to show it. I like to try to have th epicture exactly as I see it through the lens- no cheating with photoshop- not on what I want to show.
Sometimes the lens surprises me and enhances what I saw- just like when you write a poem and it turns out to say more than you thought it was going to.
Of course the photogrpaher can't detach himself any more than the writer can- he s part of the scene, part of the emotion and part of the compassion. I have learned that from reading things that photojournalists say. I am reseaching also the WW2 official photgraphers which my friend actually portrays in WW2 re-enactment and I keep telling him, he is taking the wrong kind of shots and dragging him and his 1930s Leica and showing him scenes that will tell a story. He was trained as an aerial photographer with the RAF in teh 1970s so I suppose he has an excuse for not being arty farty which is what he calls me -lol.
Thanks again Heidi. I keep re-reading your words, they have taught me things I would never have been able to think of - it is hard to explain- but thanks
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Wow.
This is super. You really hit close to home with "not wanting to look and looking to study all the details"
I've felt this way since childhood -- I have always been fascinated with photographs of all kinds and yet also worried and made heartsick by the horrific ones I tended to be interested in -- was I unwell? How come I couldn't leave the photo behind ? Why did I have to look? I've been working on a poem and for a few days I've been staring at photos of victims of Hiroshima ...
You know I cannot stand or tolerate gory movies never ever watch them -- can't. And yet I just started looking over the photos in the book of the Dead and find myself unable to stop.
I need to think about this some more. I'm working on a poem and one photo in what I've seen in those has struck me so ...
I'll be back. I think I'm rambling but this bit of writing, history and sharing has really triggered such a REAL humanness in me
Thanks..
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Interesting. You bring out an different perspective that I've never contemplated before. The first link--are those mourning rituals still in effect today?
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Thanks for reading
- certainly not in England- I would imagine that the 1914-18 war finally made a lot of them impractical as much as them falling into a black hole of social history as attitudes changed, families became smaller, medical science advanced and infant mortality dropped considerably.
In some ways I think that the rituals were based on sense and compassion for the mourners - something that we do often find hard to handle these days, and perhaps seek out new or updated rituals to replace them. I think it is a human need. The tradition of the wake still remains in some form or other, though.
A friend of ours died this week. He would have been at a 'club' gathering we are attending tomorrow evening. People will be wearing black armbands as a sign of mourning for him. -
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Wow, it's interesting how different our customs are. Thanks for sharing that bit of info.
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Most of the ancestral portraits I've seen come from the side of my mother's mother...the Polk clan. All I can say about them is, thank goodness I seem to favor my father's line! Those people didn't appear to know how to smile at all!
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Mind you- that is one of my grandfathers in my avatar, taken circa 1904. I always think he looks like he was trying hard not to laugh. I look like him.
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Hey Eric!
When I was a child, people had front parlours that were kept for special occasions. Certainly not for small boys to leave dirty footprints and sticky fingermarks in. The photographs were ranked on various cabinets and bureaux. I was told they were (some of them anyway) of my dead relatives, killed in the Great War and suchlike. Being a literal sort of child, I thought that they actually were photos taken when they were dead, because of the immobile stern faces they all seemed to have. What a silly child... or perhaps not in the light of this. Having said that, the official photos on my passport and firearms licence look like I have been embalmed. Not a glimmer of a twitching lip, no not me!
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