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Rare real colour photos of WWII
- mon_ 5y agoI had no idea there were original colour photos from the war. You often see images from this period re-coloured using modern image editing software or AI, but they never look convincing to me. These are fascinating.
- NAG3LT 5y agoFor another deep rabbit hole of true old colour photography, check Prokudin-Gorsky's photos of Russian Empire before WW1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#Gallery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#Gallery He took 3 photos with different colour filters in succession and captured them on large glass plates. Naive alignment possible before digital technology limited the quality of results, but as original separate negatives survived - it was possible to scan them at high quality and properly align digitally. So now we can see those photos in true colour and high quality. As one of examples a very vivid photo of Emir of Bukhara taken in 1911: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Prokudin-Gorskii-19.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Prokudin...
- tagoregrtst 5y agoColor photography has been around for a long time, but wasn't practical until after the war. But, consider all the color films from before the war. There must have been a color method for there to be a movie!
- jimmyed 5y agoNo pictures of the Germans? Pity they were the most stylishly dressed of the lot.
- groby_b 5y ago
- mulmen 5y ago
- dboreham 5y agoThey like red hats these days.
- tagoregrtst 5y agoThe Chavez beret? That’s left ;)
- hunterb123 5y agoI would warn you guys to not use fascist for everyone you disagree with or it's going to lose its meaning, but that ship has long sailed. If I were to pick the modern day fascist it would look more like those advocating for censorship and government control. Overall, the right is more libertarian than ever, the left seems to be getting more authoritarian.
- CamperBob2 5y agoAh, yes, the hallowed libertarian creed: "Pack the courts with theocrats so we can do what it takes to keep Those People from voting. And never mind all that free will stuff, there are babies being murdered!" Everything you see in these photographs can happen again, and can happen here. It's not even political, really -- note the quotes from FDR in the Dorothea Lange link someone posted.
- dham 5y agoIt's funny that some of these pictures still look better than what a modern phone can produce. Crazy to think about.
- ekianjo 5y agoNothing crazy about that, cameras used at the time had large film surface resulting in much high resolution than what your camera can ever hope to produce. Portable cameras (35mm style) became popular later.
- lm28469 5y agoWhat's funnier is people rediscovering this fact today, we went full circle aha Modern phones have tiny sensors. Pre 50s camera had massive sensors. Sensor size does a lot, the larger the sensor the less optical performance you need from the lenses. It also helps a lot with the "3D pop" due to depth of field, the larger the sensor the more depth of field you get. 4x5 cameras from the last century out-resolve modern 150mpx sensors. 35mm film, which has the same area as modern "full frame" cameras was called 'miniature format" until fairly recently. Iphone vs full frame size: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-de59d641fcb2cb69218544a36119d7da https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-de59d641fcb2cb69218544... full frame vs medium/large format size: https://www.quinnimages.com/wp-content/uploads/_mediavault/2017/07/sizecomparison.png https://www.quinnimages.com/wp-content/uploads/_mediavault/2...
- irthomasthomas 5y agoDigital still can't compete with film on any measure other than convenience. A 150MP Bayer Matrix sensor would resolve about 7000 lines of vertical optical resolution. I have some 35mm 50 ISO adox film here that can resolve about 600 lines per mm. That is about 21,000 lines of resolution. And there is better film which can do almost double that.
- tagoregrtst 5y agoWell, there is sensitivity. No contest, digital wins. But ya, digital photos are usually blah.
- Borborygymus 5y ago"A lathe operator forges parts...". Anyone else cringe at this?
- WalterBright 5y agoMy dad fought in the Korean war. He had a camera, and took lots of color slides. I wonder why every documentary I see on the KW is all in black+white. Another oddity. My family visited Berlin in 1969, and took several pictures of the Wall in its heyday. All with color slide film. Yet, if you look in the souvenir shops in Berlin today, all the photos of the Wall are black+white.
- IMSAI8080 5y agoReally amazing. The colour and high quality really takes you there.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoWow look at the British crank out those bombers. I look at that and wonder how they sourced all the CPUs and components... oh right, they probably had centralized domestic manufacturing and only imported raw materials. Global Warming is going to trigger large scale wars, simply far too much disruption, including the likely displacement of a billion people or more.
- garfieldnate 5y agoColor makes photographs feel so much more relatable! These photos feel recent, and yet their complete lack of plastic or any recognizable electronic devices makes it a completely different world.
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- arriu 5y agoThe guy on the tank looks like he’s holding a tablet lol
- patrakov 5y agoIt's surprising that such high-quality photos could be made back then.
- gsich 5y agoWhy not? 35mm probably has a resolution equivalent of ~20MP.
- unfocussed_mike 5y agoYep. And I think people don't have a really good grasp of how little lens resolution really improved for almost 50 years. Many of the great lens recipes were a decade or more old by this point. Plus, many 35mm films were quite high-resolution even then; the downside was they were all very slow. This form of Kodachrome was ASA 10 or 12 or something like that.
- daveslash 5y agoI currently have a roll of ISO 25 loaded in my camera right now (Rollei RPX 25) :-) I grew up shooting on film and preferred 400 over 800 speed film because of the film grain at 800 ~ the fact that my mirrorless can go up to 25600 and still look okay just blows my mind. Kodachrome. They give us those nice bright colors. They give us the greens of summers. Makes you think all the world's a sunny day. I got a Nikon camera. I love to take a photograph. Too bad mama took my Kodachrome away. ~ I'm sad that I'll never actually get to shoot on it.
- unfocussed_mike 5y agoI shot a couple of rolls of K64; I'm sad that I never shot any K25. That said my real "I wish I had..." are: - I never printed anything with classic Centennial/Kentmere POP paper, and now nobody makes the stuff. - I never shot any Agfa Scala (though Adox have brought something similar back) I bought a darkroom enlarger to use the base + column as a copy stand, and I realised at that point that I would have to do some of my own printing, even just once, or I'd always feel that I'd missed out. Those few prints are among the most significant objects I own. And now I _know_ I will do it again. Mirrorless is my day-to-day photography experience, though, with all sorts of adapted lens experiments.
- pilaf 5y agoWebsite is down for me (HN hug of death?), but archive.org had a snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20220128141631/https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/color-photos-from-second-world-war/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220128141631/https://rarehisto...
- bartread 5y agoThanks for posting the archive link. More than down, I get a message saying that the account has been suspended. Perhaps they hit some sort of usage limit with all the extra traffic?
- Andugal 5y agoYou have to wait a bit because of HN hug of death but the pictures are worth it!
- jonhohle 5y agoThe colors and perspective of “liberation of Eindhoven” are incredible. It looks like it was shot for a movie.
- spcebar 5y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20220128141631/https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/color-photos-from-second-world-war/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220128141631/https://rarehisto...
- ekianjo 5y agoNice pictures but they are all set up in the first place, these are not pictures taken "live" in any way.
- iamben 5y agoIn one of them there's literally an explosion happening. I suppose you could fake that for a photo, but it was the middle of a war?
- baud147258 5y agoEven the photo with an explosion could be set up, like in an empty street far from the front line, with the explosion timed to the capture.
- nineplay 5y agoA few of them are clearly 'live', and the concentration camp survivor holding a human bone may be "set up" but I can't see how that takes away from the impact.
- the_doctah 5y agoWhy does it matter if they were set up or not?
- ekianjo 5y agoBecause then it's not war pictures, it's pictures used to create a narrative.
- js2 5y ago> The images were commissioned by the British Ministry of Information, which got hold of a very small quantity of Kodachrome film. My dad has images he shot going back to the 60s on a variety of films: Kodachrome, Ekatchrome, GAF, Agfachrome and Fujichrome. All stored the same. The Kodachromes look like new. Everything else deteriorated in one way or another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodachrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodachrome
- unfocussed_mike 5y agoMm. The pre-E6 Agfa transparency film really is very unfortunately unstable; it had really beautiful colours but it fades.
- themadturk 5y agoMy dad took a lot of Kodachromes while flying during the Korean war. Those slides have held up very well, especially compared to my Ektachrome slides shot in the 70s and 80s. He once told me that many of his photos -- some taken out the window of his C-127 Globemaster, where he served as flight engineer -- would have been considered classified at the time.
- jrumbut 5y agoAre these posted anywhere? They sound fascinating.
- themadturk 5y agoUnfortunately no; they're somewhere with the family photos in storage.
- dbcurtis 5y agoKodachrome is a very different process from other color films. (going from memory from years ago when I dabbled in color wet-chemistry darkroom work) Most color transparency films have color-couplers linking the silver salts to dyes that are in the unexposed film. Kodachrome, as I recall, had no dyes in it as shipped from the factory. Just three layers of silver salts with different wavelength-response curves. The archival color dyes were implanted into the emulsion at processing-time. The Kodachrome process is very complex and was never approachable for home darkroom work.
- retrac 5y agoThese wouldn't count as rare as today he is a rather widely known photographer, but Wikimedia has a large collection of colour photographs from Alfred Palmer, mostly taken from 1941 to 1943 for the American Office of War Information. While effectively propaganda in nature, they're undeniably beautiful photographs. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alfred_T._Palmer https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alfred_T._Palmer Some favourites: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Rosie_the_Riveter_%28Vultee%29_DS.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Rosie_th... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Carpenter_at_the_TVA%27s_Douglas_dam_on_the_French_Broad_River%2C_Tenn.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Carpente... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/A-20_Havoc.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/A-20_Hav...
- terran57 5y agoThanks for bringing those to my attention. Very beautiful indeed.
- tablespoon 5y ago> These wouldn't count as rare as today he is a rather widely known photographer, but Wikimedia has a large collection of colour photographs from Alfred Palmer, mostly taken from 1941 to 1943 for the American Office of War Information. The photos in the OP seem like a grab bag, they include some of those photos (like this one: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M-4_tank_crews_of_the_United_States,_Ft_Knox,_Ky.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M-4_tank_crews_of_th...).
- adam12 5y agoMy favorite: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/B17F_-_Woman_workers_at_the_Douglas_Aircraft_Company_plant%2C_Long_Beach%2C_Calif.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/B17F_-_W...
- watersb 5y agoAlmost Kubrick...
- ape4 5y agoDoing machine work without protective eyewear gives me the hebejebes.
- monkmartinez 5y agoSafety squints are a time honored tradition. Sometimes you just need to Send It. We have a guy on our fire department that lost a finger a few months ago. It's completely irrational, but I am jealous in a strange way.
- nineplay 5y agoI find them surprisingly chilling and not just the ones taken at the concentration camp. The US troops preparing for D-Day, the bombs lined up on the battleship. The solder writing the name of his fallen friend on a bomb. The flamethrower, firing at an empty field but how long before Soviet solders are on the other end? Death hangs like a cloud over these photos. I wonder how many of the subjects made it through the war alive.
- echelon 5y ago> I wonder how many of the subjects made it through the war alive. Those D-Day soldiers, especially. WWII photos are among most harrowing and iconic images in human history. The technology is right on the line between old and modern. You can easily imagine yourself there with the tinny radios and the smell oil and grease. The planes and ships look scrappy, like they could easily be blown apart. Cranked out in volume to overpower the enemy, or at least have a few survive. And then there's the suffering of people in the concentration camps, people who've had their cities bombed. Their faces tell you everything. The sense of foreboding is palpable.
- agumonkey 5y agoUnrelatedly was watching videos of Syria, and people there also have chill attitudes even though many parts of their cities are destroyed. War time is strange.
- xenocratus 5y ago> even though many parts of their cities are destroyed That is, perhaps, the hedonic treadmill [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
- FredPret 5y agoNever considered that treadmill goes down as well as up! What a privilege to live in a stable part of the world!
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoIsn't "rarehistoricalphotos.com" one of those clickbait sites that I always see in news sites "Sponsored Links" sections? A lot of those sites have modern photos that have had "antique" filters, applied. I love seeing "Wild West" photos, with pictures of women in modern makeup.
- WalterBright 5y ago"1883" stars a bleached blonde woman :-)
- WalterBright 5y agoYou can always tell when period pieces were filmed by looking at the women's hair, and to a lesser extent, the men's. I always laughed at the blow-dried 'dos on Little House on the Prairie. Black Sheep Squadron had the 70's hairdos too, along with the very tightly tailored uniforms on the men. WW2 airmen never looked like that.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI can't remember what show it was, during the 80s, when WWII soldiers had mullets. The weird ones, are the "mashup" movies and shows, like Streets of Fire, and Reprisal.
- rileyphone 5y agoI highly recommend Wikimedia commons, which contains a lot of original color photographs that are also categorized fairly well. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:World_War_II_color_photographs https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:World_War_II_col...
- Razengan 5y agoIt’s soon going to be a full century since the start of WW2. I wonder if in the meantime there’ll be another war to rival it.
- vaughnegut 5y agoIf anyone is interested, this flickr account consists of digitized colour slides (so pretty high quality) from WWII and the Korean War: https://www.flickr.com/photos/58451159@N00/albums/with/72157713991166967 https://www.flickr.com/photos/58451159@N00/albums/with/72157...
- spaetzleesser 5y agoIt’s good to see pictures in color. In my mind World War 2 and before was all gray, black and white because all the pictures are that way. I remember when I visited Verdun and the WW1 battlefield there. I was pretty surprised how pretty the area was and not at all as grim as it looks in old pictures. Same with concentration camps. I visited Dachau in summer and it was also quite nice and not grim at all. I think we have a very distorted view of history because of videos and images are are seeing. Same for Hitler. A lot of people envision him as this screaming maniac but there are some recordings of him in casual conversation and he had a quite pleasant way of talking.
- gullywhumper 5y agoI like pics like the one in Cologne [1] because I try to find them on Google street view. The alignment of the spires in the original makes me think it's either taken from the north or south. - Here's a current view from the north [2]. - Here's a view from the south [3]. My guess is that it's from the south and in approximately the same location as [3]. Without going too much further down the rabbit hole, I'm assuming: - The Allies approached the city from the south. - The original pic doesn't show the train station, which I don't think was destroyed during the war. - The buildings in the original look ruined and the street view has all post-war buildings. If anyone is a better lunchtime detective, happy to be corrected! And if you could help me figure out who is in the portrait in the foreground, that would be much appreciated! 1. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fed2I0NB6x8/X3Tx_uhMp9I/AAAAAAAAaGU/XkvZfdllej0U6LN8HUBAgaDXZ_AD5-I0QCLcBGAsYHQ/s1891/color-photos-world-war-two%2B%252823%2529.jpg https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fed2I0NB6x8/X3Tx_uhMp9I/AAAAAAAAa... 2. https://goo.gl/maps/U6Sg7ZvfMoRmp8M8A https://goo.gl/maps/U6Sg7ZvfMoRmp8M8A 3. https://goo.gl/maps/BbvV58YbVSrRhQen7 https://goo.gl/maps/BbvV58YbVSrRhQen7
- Borborygymus 5y ago"A lathe operator forges parts". Anyone else cringe at this?
- tagoregrtst 5y agoNow that you mention it. Ouch
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoSomehow when viewing really old movies, chronicles or photographs, I often think that all these people, some of them so youthful and beautiful, are now dead.
- sandworm101 5y agoNote that the bulk of these are from the home front, or at least well behind the front lines. There is a reason. Colour film (the correct spelling as this is in the UK) was lower resolution than black and white. The depiction of colour was also not accurate enough to trust for intelligence purposes. So a photographer going anywhere with potential intelligence value would have carried and used black and white film. Colour film, as we see in the OP images, was for glamor shots. The photographers documenting the realities of war as it happened shot black and white. Does anyone really think those women used lipstick like that while running a lathe? Makeup like that was saved tucked away in secret boxes for the day that the photographer came around.
- FpUser 5y agoAmazingly good quality and also in links submitted elsewhere in this topic
- LightG 5y agoIncrible pictures. Does anyone with knowledge of WW2 know if there was significant resistance to the victory in the months and years after "victory"? It always strikes me as such a clear "victory" in a way I could not imagine in wars fought today. Is that just because the details of the end of the war have faded from general memory?
- retrac 5y agoEntire German armies started surrendering before the German high command officially surrendered. It was different from most contemporary wars in that all sides were functional nation-states, with organized leadership, where the army generally was obedient to the upper leadership. When the leadership surrendered, the military stood down. And no, despite that, it wasn't all that clean. Some German army divisions refused to surrender until early May 1945. There was sporadic resistance in the hills of Austria and in Yugoslavia until the end of May. In the East, Japanese holdouts, mostly in rural regions of the Philippines, Indonesia, etc., at the company level (dozens to hundreds of men) resisted in local pockets right into the 1950s, with the last guy not surrendering until 1974: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teruo_Nakamura https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teruo_Nakamura Psychologically speaking, both with Hitler's suicide and the Japanese emperor's announcement of surrender, people who lived through it often spoke of it like a spell being suddenly broken, all fervour evaporating in an instant, with intense tiredness and emptiness replacing it. They also spoke of relief. The leadership of the Axis had sworn that everyone would die to the last man if need be. And they had fought on long after the war was obviously lost. The surrender suddenly presented the possibility that people might just live. The fact that the Axis populations were starving and that the Americans started shipping in food, probably also helped convince people that it was better to not resist. It's also hard to overstate the absolute scale of the purely military aspect of the victory and the occupation of the Axis territories. Nearly all infrastructure and military hardware had been destroyed. There were around 10 million Allied soldiers in Germany in April 1945 -- a ratio of about 1 occupying soldier to 7 German civilians. Meaningful and organized resistance seems impossible in the face of that. And the occupation troops did not leave until the Allies set up puppet governments that could and would crack down on any resistance to the new order.