![]() “I think it was one of the most memorable nights of my life.”Īhead of her funeral on 19 September, revisit 13 stunning photographs of Her Majesty during the war, below. “I remember lines of unknown people linking arms and walking down Whitehall, all of us just swept along on a tide of happiness and relief,” she recalled in an interview with Radio 4 in 1985. When victory in Europe was finally declared in 1945, she stood with the royal family and Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to greet the joyous public – before slipping away with Margaret and wandering in and amongst the crowds. As the war progressed, she took on more and more duties, from championing the government’s Dig for Victory campaign by tending her own allotment to joining the Auxiliary Territorial Service, where she trained as both a driver and a mechanic. “I regard it as a home in a way no other place can be,” she subsequently admitted of the castle.įamously, on 13 October 1940, Her Majesty gave her first public address as part of the BBC’s Children’s Hour. While King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) remained at Buckingham Palace, Elizabeth and Princess Margaret were moved out to Windsor Castle for their safety before the Blitz, remaining there until the armistice. Every one of these pictures captures the best and worst of human invention: one technology used to maim, another meant simply to record history, beautifully.Princess Elizabeth was just 13-years-old when war broke out between Britain and Germany, but the future Queen still played an integral role in the war effort. The black soldier is likely from Senegal, then a French colony, and god only knows what he felt he was fighting for.) They faced the worst weapons of mass destruction that could be conjured at the time, in the form of mustard gas and machine guns. (There’s an extra layer of humanity in the 1917 photo below that shows black and white faces in one trench. Without the distance of sepia tones, these faces - their mustaches aside - somehow seem far more modern. But a few do include soldiers and villagers, and it’s almost shocking to see the French blue of the uniforms - not to mention their fastidious tailoring, which you would be unlikely to see in the field today. Most are still-lifes, of shelled buildings and the like, owing to simple technical reasons: Autochromes required a lot of light, so the exposures are slow, and people don’t hold still. There are hundreds of Autochromes of the Great War, many of them preserved by the French national library. And because the conflict was playing out right there in France, the Lumières’ plates soon made their way to the battlefield. It was the first event to which many newspapers gave substantial photographic play, notably the New York Times, which had just launched a section called the Mid-Week Pictorial. The war was a major photographic subject, of course. The soft colors, tending toward a tawny palette, are rather painterly too. The grains of dyed starch give the image a speckled pointillism much like post-Impressionist painting. Coincidentally, Autochromes often look like French paintings of the period. One of the most memorable images of the war, the title ‘We Are Making A New World’ mocks the ambitions of the war’s early leaders. ![]() National Geographic was an early adopter, and ran color pictures of wildlife throughout the teens. ![]() Anyone willing to learn how could go into a store and buy a package of Autochrome plates and shoot color photos himself. The Autochrome system was not experimental but commercially available, and it was quite successful. Once developed, the photos are not printed you view that glass plate on a lightbox, like a slide. The photographic emulsion is overlaid with specks of potato starch, dyed red, green, and blue, and both were coated on a glass plate. (They also made movies, including this one from, incredibly, 1895.) Their color system, first sold in 1907, was surprisingly refined for a first try. They were made with a technology called Autochrome, invented in 1903 by two French brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière. Photo: Paul Castelnau / ? Minist?re de la Culture / M?diath?que de l’architecture et du patrimoineDist.
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