I had seen color photographs of the first world war before (the Heritage of the Great War site has some excellent examples), but most of them seemed to be from the allied side of the lines. The Telegraph has put up some examples on their site from the German side of the western front. For those of you interested in the history, there’s a post at Damn Interesting on color photography of the same era. There are many other examples of WWI color pictures on the internet — one of the larger collections I’ve seen is here.
There’s something about color photos that really seems to bring history to life for me. Black and white pictures are good, but at the same time they don’t seem to capture the immediacy of the photograph in the same way. I suppose that’s because growing up when I did, black and white pictures were almost always of something that happened in the past, while color photos were contemporary. Color seems to bring these images forward in time, allowing you to see these things not as something that happened in the distant past, but something that was terribly real to other real people.
I really like the stereoscopic images that were so popular at the time of the First World War, and even without the viewer, it’s possible to see the same effect. I took the stereoscopic example picture from the Telegraph’s site and cropped it, and switched the image halves. This makes it so you can use the cross-eyed technique for viewing the picture in 3D — cross your eyes while looking at the picture just enough to make it look as though there are three images. Look at the middle image, make sure everything matches up, and slowly let your eyes focus on it (I find it helpful to pick something in the picture to focus on). It takes some trying, but it’s great to see these men appear as they really were 92 years ago:
German Soldiers