November 1, 2018:
His war pictures are tiny. They're mostly wallet-sized, so that I wonder if there are larger prints in someone's attic. I scan the ones I have at very high resolution, so that most of the detail is present.
They had a different relationship to visual information. Analog. Like them I grew up with that. You have physical archives to manage. The media deteriorate. The cost per image is high, so that you take fewer. It's not entirely exaggerating to say that those stiff poses are about saving film.
Today my images are in the Cloud: out there somewhere. I don't think about it. I just take them, sharpen them, and drag them to shared Cloud folders. They're BIG. Often more big than any of my monitors can display. Capturing the nuances of the information down to absurd detail.
I love the dynamic range and vibrance of my digital SLRs. And I really gotta say, the iPhone camera is perfectly great for everyday snaps. But I also love the Kodachrome slides I've scanned for safekeeping. There's a solidity to them, a heft, that sometimes feels lacking in digital images.
I wonder what camera these war pics were shot with? Maybe an Argus. And who shot them?