WOW!! Thank you.
Fantastic quality!
Thank you!
Gripping stuff - thanks for posting.
There's an even larger collection here:
http://www.greatwar.nl/
Click on the left under "The First Real Color Pictures of World War I"
Caution. Some of the other galleries have very disturbing photos of dead and mutilated soldiers particularly a raped Russian female soldier. WWI was more brutal than most people realize.
BTTT
PING
Beautiful pictures. Pastoral. Even the devastation.
Very tiny people then.
Amazing - its hard to imagine reality wasn't black & white back then. These bring the period to life. Thanks
Thank you. Memories of an innocent world, long gone. Something within me wished while I was looking at the pitucres that they had left it there. Progress is all that grand.
Does anyone know how many American veterans of WWI are still living? Unfortunately, it must be less than 100 at this point.
Thanks and the quality is better then I expected.
Those are some amazingly beautiful photographs. Thanks for the post!
Thanks, great photos!
Very impressive. Thanks for posting.
What has happened to France?
Really.
Back when those photos were taken, the French were tough bastards. And you can tell too.
And religious.
Note the priests (in uniform!) and the nuns.
That was during a terrible war, but those people look defiant, not defeated. Not at all.
That was 90 years ago, two generations. My grandfather fought in World War I.
Look at how far France has fallen!
Look at how quickly moral rot from within completely unhinged a great nation.
I tell you, those men in those photos kicked the German's asses. They were outnumbered but they fought and won. They were as fine as any troops in the world.
They do not look different from Americans, really, except for the officers photo, where they look like they're ready to mount horses for a cavalry charge.
How the mighty are fallen, in such a short time.
But WHY?
What made France fall from those guys in those photos that you would want on your side, and that nobody wanted to mess with, to the weak and feeble state that France is today?
Moral decay.
Rot from within.
The worm in the wood.
It makes you weep.
And when you see it in color, it looks more real, and close to us. What separated the poilus of my grandfather's generation from the effeminate France of today?
The loss of standards. Moral fatigue and collapse.
It happened there.
It wants to happen here.
No one is immune.
Very cool. I agree with other Freepers who are surprised at the high quality of these photos.
There was also a Russian color process at the same time. It took three exposures -- Red, Green and Blue -- separately and then the three colors were combined to make a color image. IT was very ungainly, unlike the Lumière process.
The images were odd, since the three exposures were taken separately anything that moved would be in one color.
Here's a link to the russian process.
http://www.utoronto.ca/tolstoy/colorportrait.htm
Kind of brings the whole thing to life 90 years on.
Thanks for posting. There's something about color photos that makes the scenes seem real. Black and white is too artsy, too dreamy. The color makes you feel like you're there.