A Pilgrim’s Digression

I want to take a moment and point out an online exhibition of the Library of Congress, Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939-1943.

Those of you who are photographers or who appreciate the art will find this exhibition especially exciting. It features 70 digital prints made from color Kodachrome slides taken in the period 1939-1943.

The colors in these old photographs are absolutely amazing. I’ll provide thumbnails and direct links to just a couple of my favorites after the jump. And here is a link to the entire online gallery.

Faro Caudill family at dinner, Pie Town, NM [October 1940]

Rural School Children, San Augustine County, Texas [April 1943]

Jack Whinery, homesteader, and his family, Pie Town, Texas [October 1940]

Woman working on a Vengeance dive bomber, Tennessee [February 1943]

It always amazes me how the simple addition of vivid color makes the oldest photograph look recent. We are accustomed to thinking people of the 1940’s were drab and gray-looking, but here we see the colors of the clothing that they wore and even the color the women used on their nails.

One reason that I posted the picture of the Whinery family is that psychologically, the colors of the people’s clothing, as well as the red dress of the woman in the calendar on the wall, almost totally alleviates the poverty of the environment in which the people live. Color normalizes and enriches. That picture would have been something else entirely if shot in black and white by Walker Evans.

Slides are a strikingly good medium for the preservation of photographic images. Unlike photographs, slides are typically stored in dark, acid-free containers. They don’t show the yellow acidification typical of photographs. Incidentally, I was first made aware of the excellence of slides as a preservation medium when I discovered the following collection in the Veteran’s History Project collections.

Korean War veteran Nick Phillips took black and white photos as well as color Kodachrome slides during his tour of duty in Korea. Though he did not describe his pictures well enough for us to make authoritative captions, his photos from the war seem as recent as if he took them yesterday in Iraq.

If you have a moment, check out Phillips’ photo collection (the black and white photos precede the color slides), and stop by the online exhibition for Bound for Glory and take a look at the rest of the photographs.