So I’m officially in love with the Library of Congress images on Flickr. Therefore, I think I’ll occupy some web space here for a while highlighting some of my favourite images from the collection, in an effort to ram its greatness down the throats of the folks who visit my corner of the internet.
I set up a semi-manual method for adding bulk tags to photos all taken by the same photographer, at the same location and on the same date yesterday, and kind of went nuts looking at the wartime (isn’t it interesting that somehow the total mobilization of the country during WWII is our immediate association with the term “wartime’?) photography of Howard R. Hollem, a man whom my internet searching tells me nothing about – it just leads me back to his photos.
Hollem shot a fantastic amount of photos in aircraft assembly plants in 1942-1943, including a huge number of “Rosie the Riveter” type images. Looking at some of these images, it’s hard to how staged they are – either the man just takes too good of a photograph, or women, during wartime, just dressed way too nice to go to work. Regardless, there’s an amazing amount of complex imagery going on here – a woman, in modern dress, with her hair at the height of fashion, working long hours in a factory to produce an endless stream of armaments. I doubt the workers at the Rancho Cucamonga General Dynamics plant where the US turned out a steady stream of Stinger missiles to supply our Muhajideen friends during our 1980′s proxy war with the Soviets in Afghanistan evoked quite the same dynamism as subjects, even if you went to some lengths to stage them.
I love the photo above because it shows one of those unlikely jobs that you always wonder about. Who paints the stars on these things? Ms. Irma Lee McElroy did. Wife of a flight instructor, and former office worker, this is how she spent her war, in Corpus Christi, Texas.
Photo Details: Painting the American insignia on airplane wings is a job that Mrs. Irma Lee McElroy, a former office worker, does with precision and patriotic zeal. Mrs. McElroy is a civil service employee at the Naval Air Base, Corpus Christi, Texas. Her husband is a flight instructor. Howard R. Hollem, August, 1942, Corpus Christi, TX.
Technorati Tags: Library of Congress, Howard R. Hollem, Howard Hollem, photography, photograph, Irma Lee McElroy, war effort, WWII, WW2, World War II, star, painter, Corpus Christi, public domain
Hi,
We have a project similar to the LoC pilot project, called “PhotosNormandie”, which is alive since one year about:
http://www.flickr.com/people/photosnormandie/
For now, descriptions are in French language and we are trying to improve them. So, we invite comments to get better localisations, better identifications, check and verify information, etc.
A main difference between the two projects is the following: we are using IPTC metadata that are embedded in our hi-res photos, but LoC does not use IPTC and their descriptions and tags are attached to Flickr platform.
With best regards
–
Patrick Peccatte
Wow! Those are some amazing images there Patrick.
I wish I read French. Right now is the perfect time to do projects like this as there are still many people alive who were there and can add that bit of information that otherwise will be lost to history.
The answer is that, yes, people did dress better for work and, yes, some of those photos were staged. Even the ones that were, though, didn’t have arranged wardrobes. I have quite a few photos of ordinary folks doing ordinary things in the 40′s and they are dressed in what we would consider a much more formal way. Our sense of everyday casual dress doesn’t really come on to the scene until the late 50′s, with the Beatnik styles. They are the ones you can thank (or blame) for our sense of what appropriate daywear is.
Given that most of the photos I’ve been looking at were shot with 4×5 cameras, the subject would have to be holding still much of the time. So everything is staged to some degree.
It’s just crazy to see people working in clothes that shouldn’t last 5 minutes in a factory environment. Especially pre-OSHA.
One of the very “non casual dress” things I’ve noticed is pilots and crews getting ready for takeoff and still wearing their ties.
[...] and Michel Le Querrec, PhotosNormandie, was brought to my attention as a comment by Patrick in an earlier post. PhotosNormandie is a collection of images from and related to the Battle of Normandy, [...]