Figure 1 – “No man’s land in Flanders field, France, during World War I,” from the wikimediacommons, original in the US Library of Congress and in the public domain.

One hundred years ago today, July 28, 1914 Austro-Hungarian guns began firing in preparation for the invasion of Serbia.  It was the ultimate folly, the opening shots of World War I or the “Great War,” and by the time it was over four and a half years later 10 million had died to be followed soon by 50 million succumbing to the Spanish Flu pandemic the the war’s end engendered. I say the ultimate folly, but watch the news tonight and wonder if we have learned anything.

The First World War was well photographed.  There are gruesome stills and even video footage of the misery and carnage.  I thought that I would post a couple of images in tribute or remembrance. Figure 1 shows the “no man’s land” in Flanders, France a desolate, alien, and gruesome place. And Figure 2 is a different view of this nether world.  It shows an aerial reconnaissance photograph of the opposing trenches and no-man’s land between Loos and Hulluch in Artois, France, taken at 7.15 pm, 22 July 1917. German trenches are at the right and bottom, British trenches are at the top left. The vertical line to the left of centre indicates the course of a pre-war road or track.

“Zonder liefde, warme liefde
        Sterft de zomer, de droeve zomer
        En schuurt het zand over mijn land
        Mijn platte land, mijn Vlaanderland.”+

+”Without love, warm love
The summer dies, the sad summer
And the sand scours my country
My flat country, my Flanders”

Jacques Brel, “Marieke”

Figure 2 – An aerial reconnaissance photograph of the opposing trenches and no-man’s land between Loos and Hulluch in Artois, France, taken at 7.15 pm, 22 July 1917. German trenches are at the right and bottom, British trenches are at the top left. The vertical line to the left of centre indicates the course of a pre-war road or track.
From the wikimediacommons, originally from the UK Imperial War Museums and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – “The Day Before.” From the Library of Congress Archives and in the public domain.

Continuing our saga – because of hurricane Arthur Fourth of July celebrations and fireworks displays are continuing here on the East Coast.  The Fifth is proving absolutely golden spectacular.  I have been amusing myself trying to locate the earliest known photograph of Fourth of July celebrations and the first ever photograph of pyrotechnics.  I’m afraid that I still haven’t figured it all out.

However, in perusing the archives of the United States Library of Congress, I keep being drawn to this wonderful stereo card image by E. W. Kelly from 1906 entitled “The Day Before,” and showing a darling little child, arms filled with fireworks and the American flag.  Hint that’s not an IPad in the child’s right hand. 8<}. Note the pinhole aperture effect of the shadows on the ground.

It goes to show both the similarities and the differences between Americans in 2014 and Americans in 1906.  Today parents would shudder to see their child laden down with deadly explosives! It was then just part of the glory of early twentieth century childhood.

Figure 1 – National Airlines flight attendants 1972 in first class cabin. Image from the Wikimeda Commons. Image from Clipperarctic and uploaded by Russavia under creative commons attribution license.

Who can forget F. William Free’s (1928-2003) controversial, and filled with sexual ineuendo, ad campaign for National Airlines “I’m Cheryl. Fly me?”  In a sense, this ad accentuated the essential conflict between the feminist movement of the sixties and seventies and the prevailing objectivization of women. For years, flight attendants rivaled pageant queens in glamour and fashion.  This week NBC News’ website has offered a retrospective on flight attendant dress from the glamorous to the bizarre.  It also serves as a litany of long lost airlines, and it is a brain strain to recollect them all.

Apparently, the distinction of being the first flight attendant goes to Ellen Church (1904-1965), who in 1930 convinced Boeing Air Transport (now United Airlines) that having onboard caped nurses would help alleviate those passengers with a fear of flying.  There is this wonderful photograph from the Boeing archives of the original eight flight attendants standing in front of an A-80.  

My favorite of the vintage images that NBC News’ retrospective is an eye-popping print for Braniff Airlines in 1966 by Pucci (from the collection of Cliff Muskiet ).  Braniff Airlines? Ah yes, I remember Braniff Airlines.  My last Braniff Flight was Boston to Kansas City. It was a blistering day and the flight was so delayed that we were overloaded for the short runway.  So they waited something like four hours for people to get so frustrated that they got off.  Finally, when the weight was acceptable, the plane wouldn’t move. It was so hot that the tarmack had melted under the front wheel…

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/travel/what-they-wore-flight-attendant-uniforms-past-present-n142891

Figure 1 – First photograph of a tornado, taken by A.A. Adams in Anderson County, KS, from the Kansas Historical Society and in the public domain because it was taken and published before 1923.

My brief discussion of the supercell video yesterday got me wondering about what the first ever photograph of a tornado or twister was.  The obvious place to turn for this sort of information is the Kansas Historical Society’s website, and it didn’t disappoint.

The first photograph of a tornado, Figure 1, was taken on April 26, 1884 by fruit farmer and amateur photographer A.A. Adams in Anderson County Kansas.  Adams was standing twelve miles from the storm. He subsequently published his photograph both as a cabinet image and as a stereographic image, where he focused in on the storm.  Unfortunately for him, his image was rapidly eclipsed by a second image taken in South Dakota on August 28, 1884, although that images appears to have been doctored.

All of this, is perhaps needless-to-say, the precursor that spawned generations of storm chasers and, of course, the 1996 Jan De Bont film “Twister.” Who can forget the flying cows?

Figure 1 – The Warren Court (SCOUS) in 1953. Photograph by Palumbo for the World Telegram. From the Wikimedia Commons and the US Library of Congress, in the public domain.

Today, May 17, 2014, marks the 60th anniversary of the unanimous decision of the United States Supreme Court banning segregated schools in the United States.  I thought that I would commemorate this occasion with a historic photograph by Ed Palumbo of the Warren Court.  This particular photograph, as described in the header of the image, was used to accompany the UPI story by Louis Cassels in the New York World Telegram & Sun about the decision. The members of the Warren Court, taken in 1953. Back row (left to right): Tom Clark, Robert H. Jackson, Harold Burton, and Sherman Minton. Front row (left to right): Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Stanley Reed, and William O. Douglas.

Well, it all gets even more bizarre – ain’t that always the case.  In researching my two posts on mummies, I found two an interesting blog about the mummy photograph fad of the late nineteenth early twentieth century.  The fad involved having yourself photographed in a mummy case and appears to have been started by American society lady Mrs. James P. Kernochan of New York on her return from a trip abroad that included Cairo.

A Cairo photographer obtained a mummy case and cut out the face.  The subject (victim) would climb in and pose with their face sticking out of the hole.  We still see this kind of gimmick at amusement parks.  As the fad grew, intrepid photographers, especially those with access, to mummy cases took a photograph of a mummy case cut out the face and placed this over a portrait of the subject.  What a darling present for one’s beau.  Don’t you think!

Francis Frith self portrait in Middle Eastern garb, 1857. From the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain because of agae. Oroginal photograph is in the Philadelphia Museum..

Our discussion on Friday of antique photographs of the unveriling of ancient Egyptian mummies got me thinking of Francis Frith (1822-1898).  Frith was the first great photographer of ancient Egyptian monuments and the Nile Valley.

Francis Frith  was an English photographer of the Middle East and many towns in the United Kingdom.  Frith recognized that images of Egypt were in great demand by “armchair travelers.”  From 1856 to 1860 he traveled in the Middle East with a huge (16″ x 20″) with a collodion process camera.  This was a great accomplishment given the dust and heat of the desert. We have said this repeatidly of many of Frith’s contemporaries – yet in remains indisputable.  Photographing in those days required extreme dedication to purpose, art, and technique.

In 1859, he opened the firm of Francis Frith & Co., which was the world’s first specialist photographic publisher, selling his beautiful images of Egypt and the Middle East.  He then embarked on a colossal project, typical of the grand vision Victorian mindset – to photograph every town in the United Kingdom.  These he sold as travel postcards. Eventually hiring a team of photographers, his studio became one of the largest in the world, with over a thousand shops selling his postcards.

Remarkably, his family continued the firm well into the twentieth century.  It was sold in 1968 and closed in 1970 only to be  was restored in a 1976 as The Francis Frith Collection, when this important archive was purchased by  the tobacco company Rothmans.  

In 1977, John Buck bought the archive from Rothmans and has continued to run it as an independent business since that time – trading as The Francis Frith Collection. As a result even today, over 150 years since it founding you can still find and purchase both nostalgic and historic images.

Figure 2 – The Hypaethral Temple, Philae, by Francis Frith, 1857; from the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland (on Flickr), from the Wikimedia commons and in the public domain because of age.