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. While effectively propaganda in nature, they're undeniably beautiful photographs.<p><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alfred_T._Palmer" rel="nofollow">https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alfred_T._Palmer</a><p>Some favourites:<p><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Rosie_the_Riveter_%28Vultee%29_DS.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Rosie_th...</a><p><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Carpenter_at_the_TVA%27s_Douglas_dam_on_the_French_Broad_River%2C_Tenn.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Carpente...</a><p><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/A-20_Havoc.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/A-20_Hav...</a>
I like pics like the one in Cologne [1] because I try to find them on Google street view.<p>The alignment of the spires in the original makes me think it's either taken from the north or south.<p>- Here's a current view from the north [2].<p>- Here's a view from the south [3].<p>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:<p>- The Allies approached the city from the south.<p>- The original pic doesn't show the train station, which I don't think was destroyed during the war.<p>- The buildings in the original look ruined and the street view has all post-war buildings.<p>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!<p>1. <a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fed2I0NB6x8/X3Tx_uhMp9I/AAAAAAAAaGU/XkvZfdllej0U6LN8HUBAgaDXZ_AD5-I0QCLcBGAsYHQ/s1891/color-photos-world-war-two%2B%252823%2529.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fed2I0NB6x8/X3Tx_uhMp9I/AAAAAAAAa...</a><p>2. <a href="https://goo.gl/maps/U6Sg7ZvfMoRmp8M8A" rel="nofollow">https://goo.gl/maps/U6Sg7ZvfMoRmp8M8A</a><p>3. <a href="https://goo.gl/maps/BbvV58YbVSrRhQen7" rel="nofollow">https://goo.gl/maps/BbvV58YbVSrRhQen7</a>
Website is down for me (HN hug of death?), but archive.org had a snapshot:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220128141631/https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/color-photos-from-second-world-war/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20220128141631/https://rarehisto...</a>
I 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?<p>Death hangs like a cloud over these photos. I wonder how many of the subjects made it through the war alive.
> The images were commissioned by the British Ministry of Information, which got hold of a very small quantity of Kodachrome film.<p>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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodachrome" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodachrome</a>
Isn't "rarehistoricalphotos.com" one of those clickbait sites that I always see in news sites "Sponsored Links" sections?<p>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.
I highly recommend Wikimedia commons, which contains a lot of original color photographs that are also categorized fairly well.<p><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:World_War_II_color_photographs" rel="nofollow">https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:World_War_II_col...</a>
I 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.
Note 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.<p>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.
If anyone is interested, this flickr account consists of digitized colour slides (so pretty high quality) from WWII and the Korean War:<p><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/58451159@N00/albums/with/72157713991166967" rel="nofollow">https://www.flickr.com/photos/58451159@N00/albums/with/72157...</a>
Somehow when viewing really old movies, chronicles or photographs, I often think that <i>all these people, some of them so youthful and beautiful, are now dead</i>.
My 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.<p>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.
Wow look at the British crank out those bombers.<p>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.<p>Global Warming is going to trigger large scale wars, simply far too much disruption, including the likely displacement of a billion people or more.
Incrible pictures.<p>Does anyone with knowledge of WW2 know if there was significant resistance to the victory in the months and years after "victory"?<p>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?
Color 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.
It’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.<p>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.