Mexican troops were dispatched to suppress an uprising by the Maya Indians in Yucatán.
Byron Wyoming was incorporated.
Farm Security Administration Marion Post Wolcott was born in New Jersey.
Last edition:
Showing posts with label Photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Photography. Show all posts
Saturday, June 7, 2025
Friday, May 2, 2025
Wednesday, May 2, 1945. Berlin taken.
The Red Army took Berlin.
Yevgeny Khaldei took the staged Raising a Flag over the Reichstag photograph, showing Soviet troops raising the flag of the Soviet Union atop the Reichstag. The unretouched variant is shown above, i which one soldier is wearing two watches, which was later edited out of the photo as at least one of them was no doubt picked up somewhere.
The Nisei 552nd Field Artillery Bn liberated a Dachau death march.
The Germans surrendered in Italy and Southern Austria. Among those going into Allied captivity is Dr. Wernher von Braun.
Admiral Dönitz's formed the Flensburg Government.
Eamon de Valera paid a visit to Dr Eduard Hempel, the German minister in Ireland, to offer his condolences on the death of Hitler. Nobody has ever been able to grasp this.
Erich Bärenfänger, 30, German Generalmajor, Martin Bormann, 44, German Nazi official; Wilhelm Burgdorf, 50, German general; Walther Hewel, 41, German diplomat; Hans Krebs, 47, German general; and Franz Schädle, 38, German commander of Hitler's personal bodyguard, killed themselves.
Peter Högl, 47, German SS-Obersturmbannführer, Ewald Lindloff, 36, Waffen-SS officerMartin Strahammer, 54, German Generalmajor; and Joachim von Siegroth, 48, German Generalmajor were killed in action.
The British landed on Rangoon.
Last edition:
Tuesday, May 1, 1945. German radio reports Hitler dead.
Labels: 1940s, 1945, Adolf Hitler, Battle of Tarakan, Borneo, Germany, Joseph Goebbels, Karl Dönitz, Operation Oboe, Radio, Rape and the Red Army, The Battle of Halbe, World War Two
Friday, April 18, 2025
Sunday, February 23, 2025
Tuesday, August 27, 2024
Wednesday, August 27, 1924. Color photos over the wire.
AT&T announced that a color photograph had been successfully transmitted from Chicago to New York via Wirephoto.
The German built, due to reparations, USS Los Angeles made its first flight.
The Lost Angeles over Berlin, 1924.
She was the longest serving rigid airship, serving, with interruptions, until 1939.
Last edition:
Monday, August 25, 1924. Ratifying the Dawes Plan and questionable movies.
Labels: 1920s, 1924, 1924 at the Movies, Camping, Dawes Plan, Diplomacy, German Weimar Republic, Movies, Politics
Friday, August 9, 2024
Tuesday, May 21, 2024
Sunday, May 21, 1944. The West Loch Disaster.
The West Loch Disaster, caused by a mortar round detonating on LST-353 in Pearl Harbor, resulted in 163 men being killed and six LST's sinking.
LST 480 today. Photo by Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Jessica O. Blackwell.
Negative assemblers T/5 William Robertson, 19121160, Sig C, of Los Angeles, Ca., and T/5 Robert Christensen, 17069147, Sig C, of Ogden, Iowa, preparing developed negatives for printing.
Last prior edition:
Saturday, May 20, 1944. Dismantling a V-2
Saturday, March 16, 2024
Thursday, March 16, 1944. Lucky Legs II
One of the most iconic photographs of World War Two was taken on this day in 1944, that being a rare combat action photograph. The subject was M4 Sherman supported infantrymen on Bougainville.
From Sarah Sundin's blog:
Today in World War II History—March 16, 1944: US Air Transport Command begins airlift of 5th Indian Division from Arakan in southern Burma to reinforce besieged Imphal and Kohima in India.
The Japanese Indian Ocean Raid ended inconclusively with lackluster results, and Japanese atrocities.
The Tautoq sank the Shirakumo east of Muroran, Hokkaido.
US and British aircraft sank the U-392 in the Strait of Gilbralter.
President Roosevelt addressed Finland:
March 16, 1944It has always seemed odd to me and to the people of the United States to find Finland a partner of Nazi Germany, fighting side by side with the sworn enemies of our civilization.The Finnish people now have a chance to withdraw from this hateful partnership. The longer they stay at Germany's side the more sorrow and suffering is bound to come to them. I think I can speak for all Americans when I say that we sincerely hope Finland will now take the opportunity to disassociate herself from Germany.
The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor of NASA, proposed a jet-propelled transonic research airplane be developed, which would leads to the "X" series research airplane projects.
Bell X-1, which would first fly in 1946.
Last prior:
Monday, February 19, 2024
Saturday, February 19, 1944. Landing on Eniwetok.
Marines and Coast Guardsmen display a Japanese flag, Engebi, Eniwetok Atoll, 19 February 1944.
Marines land on Eniwetok in regimental strength. Fighting is heavy. Among the casualties is John A. Bushemi, noted combat photographer. He was 26 years of age.
Landing craft headed towards Eniwetok, February 19, 1944.
And also Cpl. Anthony Damato.
Corporal Anthony P. DamatoFor conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving with an assault company in action against enemy Japanese forces on Engebi Island, Eniwetok Atoll, Marshall Islands, on the night of 19[-20 February 1944. Highly vulnerable to sudden attack by small, fanatical groups of Japanese still at large despite the efficient and determined efforts of our forces to clear the area, Cpl. Damato lay with two comrades in a large foxhole in his company's defense perimeter which had been dangerously thinned by the forced withdrawal of nearly half of the available men. When one of the enemy approached the foxhole undetected and threw in a hand grenade, Cpl. Damato desperately groped for it in the darkness. Realizing the imminent peril to all three and fully aware of the consequences of his act, he unhesitatingly flung himself on the grenade and, although instantly killed as his body absorbed the explosion, saved the lives of his two companions. Cpl. Damato's splendid initiative, fearless conduct, and valiant sacrifice reflect great credit upon himself and the U.S. Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his comrades.
From Sarah Sundin:
Today in World War II History—February 19, 1944: The major Japanese air & naval base at Rabaul is officially neutralized by Allied forces as the last Japanese planes are moved to Truk.
The Germans ended Operation Sumpfhahn against partisans in Belarus.
The U-386 and U-264 were both sunk by the Royal Navy in the Atlantic.
Billboard modified its "Most Played Juke Box Records" chart to rank records rather than songs.
Friday, December 29, 2023
Sunday, June 25, 2023
Monday, June 25, 1923. Harding comes to Cheyenne and Laramie. The Ku Klux Klan came to Glenrock
The Tribune headlined with an auto accident that occurred in connection with Hardin's visit to Denver the day prior.
In Laramie, it was noted, but the focus was on his visit that would occur today.
He was stopped by Cheyenne as well, where the city gave him a cowboy hat, and he delivered a speech on the coal situation.
The size of the demonstration is surprising. I was not small.
The paper was silent on the lawlessness that concerned the Klan, but it was likely violations of Prohibition. The KKK was a supporter of Prohibition.
An elevated train collapsed in Brooklyn, killing seven people.
The Progressive Conservative Party won provincial elections in Ontario.
Portland:
Wednesday, May 17, 2023
The death throws of the newspapers.
Back when I was in high school, I briefly toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist.
I was never very serious about it, it was only one of the possibilities I was considering. In junior high and my first year or so of high school, I was fairly certain that I'd pursue a career as an Army officer, but already by that time that desire was wearing off. I liked writing and still do, so it seemed like a possibility. I also liked photography, and still do, and it seemed like a career where you could combine both, although in that era press photographers were usually just that, photographers.
I took my high school's journalism class as a result and was on the school newspaper. Doing that, I shot hundreds of photographs of our high school athletes, as well as some really interesting events. I did learn how to write in the journalist's style, which involves summarizing the story in the first paragraph figuring that some people will read no more than that, summarizing it again in the last paragraph, and filling in the story in between. Good news stories still read that way, although I've noticed in recent years that is observed less and less.
During that year or so I had the occasion to tour the local paper, and the class had a senior, a young woman, who actually already worked there as a reporter.
That paper was no small affair. The paper was a regional one, as well as the city paper, and it's building just off of downtown, still there was very large. That large structure, with a massive open news floor and a big printing room, was at least the fourth locality it had occupied, outgrowing the prior three. It would outgrow that one was well and build an absolutely massive structure just outside of town.
Last year, it sold it.
Now, the paper is headquartered in what was once a bar/restaurant downtown. Much, much smaller. It doesn't have presses anymore, it prints the paper in another state. Far from having a large staff of reporters with dedicated beats, it's down to one or two writers who are always "cubs", just starting out. It doesn't print newspapers at all on two days a week, right now, but relies on an electronic edition that mimics the appearance of a newspaper on your computer.
You can't pick up and thumb through a pdf.
This past week, it announced that it was going to quit printing a Sunday edition and quit physical home delivery for the three issues per week it will still print. Those will be mailed from the printing location in another state.
It's dying.
It's not surprising really, but it is sad.
At one time, it was a real force to be reckoned with, and people frankly feared it. Everyone subscribed to it. I know one family that sued it for liable due to what they regarded as inaccurate reporting on them.
Newspapers reformed themselves after the introduction of radio. That's something that tends not to be very well known about them. Before radio, many newspapers tended to be some species of scandal rag and they were usually heavily partisan in their reporting. You can think of them, basically, the way people think of Fox News today. As radio cut into their readership, papers consolidated and adopted a new ethic that they reported objectively.
They frankly never really achieved full objectivity, as that may not be possible. But they did strive for it. The introduction of television reinforced this. Newspapers became the place where you could, hopefully, get complete objective news and, hopefully, in depth news on various topics. Even smaller newspapers had dedicated reporters per topic, larger ones very much so. The local paper had local reporters that reported per topic assignment. A big paper, like the Rocky Mountain News, had very specified reporters. The Rocky Mountain News, for instance, had a religion reporter whose beat was just that topic. A surprising number of local papers sent reporters to South Vietnam during the Vietnam War just to report on the war.
That's all long past. For quite some time, reporters have become generalists by default, and as a rule, they can't be expected to have an in-depth understanding of any one topic. For that reason, they are frequently inaccurate, even on a national level. Just today, for example, I read a national story which repeatedly referred to Communion Hosts as "wafers". That's not the right term. Reporters on crime blindly accept the "mass shooting" and "high powered rifle" lines without having any idea what they mean. Print reporters repeat in some instances, depending upon individual reporters, hearsay as fact, in part because they likely don't have the time to really investigate everything personally.
Because we now get green reporters, the obvious fact that the local paper is dying is all the sadder. At one time green reporters could at least hope to move up the ranks in their local papers, maybe becoming editors or columnists if they stayed there, or they could move on, as they often did, to larger papers. They still move on, but papers everywhere are dying. Ironically, the only papers that still do fairly well are the genuine small town papers in small towns. That's good, but that can't be a career boosting job for those who enter it.
And with the death of the paper the objectivity that they brought in, back in their golden era, which I'd place from the 1930s through 1990 or so, is dying with them. People are going to electronic news, which so far hasn't shown that same dedication, although recently some online start-ups actually do. Television news has become hopelessly shallow, fully dedicated to the "if it bleeds it leads" type of thinking, or fully partisan, telling people what they want to hear. Really good reporting, and not all of it was really good, was pretty informative, which raised the level of the national intellect. People might have hated reporters, and they often did, but they read what was being reported about Richard Nixon and Watergate or what was revealed in the Pentagon Papers and had a better understanding of it in spite of themselves. That helped result in Republicans themselves operating to bring Richard Nixon down and society at large bringing an end to the Vietnam War.
Now, in contrast, we have electronic propaganda organs on the net that feed people exactly what they want to hear, and that often is the same thing that comes out of the back end of a cow.
Not overnight, of course. This has been going on for decades, and indeed in some ways it started with the first radio broadcasts. But radio was easier to adjust to. The internet, not so much.
The death of a career, an institution, and unfortunately, also our wider understanding.
Sic transit.
Saturday, April 8, 2023
Speed Graphic.
I just posted this photograph here the other day.
Saturday, April 7, 1923. Japanese Cherry Trees.
Miss Yukiko Haraguchi, daughter of Major General Hatsutaro Haraguchi, military attaché of the Japanese embassy, at the cherry trees at the tidal basin Washington, D.C.
I posted the same photograph on Reddit's 100 Years Ago sub. As of right now, it has 677 up votes. I'm often surprised by what is popular on the sub.
One thing that hadn't really occurred to me, and should have, is that this photo, and most of the press photos of that era, would have been taken by Speed Graphic type cameras, using 4x5" film. 35 mm cameras, which I'm quite familiar with, didn't become popular with the Press until the 1960s, which I really didn't realize, and the first 35 mm camera didn't come about until 1925 when Leica introduced them. 35 mm wouldn't even have existed at the time this photo was taken, which I should have known, as I discussed the history of cameras a bit here:
There were a wide variety of 35 mm cameras by the 1920s, and popular personal photograph got an enormous boost with the 1939 introduction of the Argus C3. Through the lens reflex cameras made their appearance in the 1920s, but it wasn't until 1949 that the prismatic SLR was introduced, sparking a revolution amongst photography enthusiasts. Nearly every serious camera maker soon introduced one, and they dominated in the serious photography market until the end of the film era. My father bought a really good SLR Zeiss camera while serving in the Air Force, and the camea was so good that he used it hte rest of his life.Zeiss Contraflex.Lens barrel for Contrafex, which fixed the existing lens on an extension for a telephoto effect. I never actually saw this in use, and it does strike me as difficult to use.My father also had a Yashica 120 mm camera. These cameras used big film for a finer detailed photograph, much the way "full frame" digital cameras due today (while most people don't use full frame digital cameras, the lack of one is a source of ongoing angst for Pentax fans, as Pentax does not make a full frame DSLR, just their regular DSLR). It was a nice, if cumbersome, camera and my father used it less over the years, probably due to that. And film became very difficult to obtain.Yashicaflex with lens caps on and viewer closed.Viewer cover opened.Top of camera, with viewer opened. You viewed the object through the top of the camera and saw the image reversed.
Digital photography seemed likely to put a big dent in SLR cameras, and it did at first, but now they've revived, particularly in the form of Canon cameras in the US. But most of the old SLR manufacturers, save for Zeiss and Leica, which dropped out of the SLR market, still make one, and a couple of makers have entered the field who did not make film cameras. But, just as I suppose more photos were taken with Kodak disposable and compact 35mms back in the day, more now are probably taken by cell phones.
Still, what a revolution in photography, even if things remain familiar.
The common press camera of this era was a large affair. This photo, of press photographers from the 20s, gives a good idea of what they were like.
Press photographers, 1920s. The two on the right have some variant of Speed Graphics, although the size of their cameras is obviously different.
Massive cameras, they shot 4×5 inch film typically, although some shot larger or smaller film. The quality of the film was excellent, which is what lead to this thread, as the quality of the photo posted above was heavily discussed.
I'm so used to 35 mm cameras, this didn't really occur to me. It should have, as in old film you see the Speed Graphics as a prop all the time. It frankly didn't occur to me that they'd had such a long run, however.
Speed Graphics were an American camera (hard to believe there even was such a thing) that was made by Graflex from 1912 until 1973. They loaded with one massive negative, making them, in essence, the film equivalent of the full frame digital camera of today. The quality of their b&w images was superior to any digital version of the same now produced. Not surprisingly, therefore, they still have a following, even though they are huge, cumbersome, heavy, and take single negatives.
They were, however the press camera of their era, having nearly a 60 year run.
The camera was issued to U.S. Army combat photographers in World War Two as the PH-47.
Even by World War Two, however, the 35 mm was making some inroads, albeit mostly with private photographers. A notable exception was famous photographer Robert Capa, who carried several Zeiss Contax cameras with him, including one that used 120 mm film and one that used 35 mm film. He, of course, was a private press photographer.
Signal Corps photographers? Speed Graphics.
And most press photographers too.
Related Threads:
Wednesday, January 25, 2023
Thursday, January 25, 1923. Auf Widersehen
The remaining U.S. troops in Europe, fresh off occupation duty in Germany, abandoned, most likely, their German sweethearts, girlfriends and good beer, and boarded the U.S. Navy transport the St. Mihiel, which departed thereafter from Antwerp following a simple ceremony.
The St. Mihiel, AP-32. The ship would serve through World War Two, becoming a hospital ship.
Ah well, what could go wrong with the US turning its back on Europe, eh?
For those who might consider my initial comment too flippant, most US occupation troops in Germany were very late war conscripts, although not all of them were, who notoriously had a difficult time grasping the Germans as having been enemies.
French troops on the same day battled mobs in the Ruhr and dealt with a regional railway strike.
The Asahi Graph (アサヒグラフ, Asahi Gurafu, The Asahi Picture News) founded. The photo magazine ran until 2000.
Issue from 1937.
The Japanese, like the Germans, took a very early interest in photography and the magazine had a reputation of being sort of a Japanese version of Life.
Sunday, January 22, 2023
Friday, January 23, 1943. Chinook.
A Chinook wind caused an increase in temperature in Spearfish, South Dakota, in which the temperature went from -4F to 45F in two minutes. It ultimately went up to 54F over two hours, then dropped back below 0 in 30 minutes, all of this in a single morning.
Papua was liberated from the Japanese, becoming the first territory they had captured from which they'd been completely expelled.
Japan's losses on the island were 13,000 in number, compared to 2,000 for Australia and 600 for the United States.
On the same day, the British 8th Army took Tripoli.
According to many sources, today, not yesterday, was the date on which the Germans lost their last airfield at Stalingrad.
French police and German forces began the Marseilles Roundup, the gathering and deportation of the city's Jewish population. The action would result in the deportation of 1,642 people, the displacement of 20,000 and the arrest of 6,000. The Old Port district was destroyed.
Margaret Bourke-White flew in a U.S. bombing mission over Tunis in the B-17 Little Bill. The photographer and reporter was the first woman to do so.
Bourke-White was already a famous photographer by that time, having photographed extensively during the Great Depression and having photographed the Soviet Union prior to World War Two. She died at age 67 in 1971 of Parkinson's Disease.
Franklin Roosevelt dined with Moroccan Sultan Mohammed V, during which he expressed sympathy for post-war Moroccan independence.
Roosevelt was always solidly anti-colonial, a fact that became an increasing problem for the British as the war went on and which would impact the immediate post war world.
Monday, September 12, 2022
Tuesday, September 12, 1922. Episcopal Church removes "obey" from wedding vows.
The Episocpal Church in the United States voted to change the Book of Common Prayer requiring the bride to obey her husband, by omitting that verb.
The USGS was at Rainbow Bridge on this day in September, 1922.
Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Thursday, August 31, 1922. Flying cameras, murderous Communists, economic reprieve, drunk driving criminals, Russia of the recent past.
The Untied State's military was experimenting with areal cameras and gun cameras on this day in 1922.
Both would become airborne staples in future years.
Mongolian Prime Minister Dambyn Chagdarjav and his successor Dogsomyn Bodoo were executed, a fate common to early Communist who were often murdered on trumped-up charges by their own regimes.
Germany was granted a six-month reprieve of reparations payments by the Allied Reparations Commission.
Al Capone was arrested for hitting a taxicab while driving drunk. He had also threatened to shoot one of the witnesses.
Life came out with an American Russian edition. It'd be interesting to know what the contents of that issue were. It depicted a Russia that was now in the past.
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