From an Adventure Book to a War Photo Album? A Comparative Perspective on Photo Albums from the First and Second World Wars

In recent years, there have been many publications regarding various aspects of the Great War. Although the centenary celebrations to commemorate the beginning and end of World War I (WWI) are over, the events and persons related to this world conflict still represent actual topics for researchers throughout Europe and worldwide.One such topic, which can be described as a story about “small” or ordinary people during a “great” and extraordinary time, concerns the military service of physician Eugen (Jenő Andor Róbert) Lesskó (Leskó), who served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during WWI. Like an enormous number of other direct or indirect participants of that war on both confrontational sides, Jenő Lesskó was likely to remain unknown to a wider audience. However, thanks to the discovery of his photographs and the brief remarks written on the front or back of these from the turn of 1915/1916, now housed in the East Slovakian Museum in the city of Košice, Slovakia, we can now read some of his thoughts and look at photographs of WWI. These photos capture the situation in the occupied Serbian metropolis of Belgrade. Two historians, Martin Jarinkovič and Viktor Szabó, who work in Košice institutions (Martin Jarinkovič in the East Slovakian Museum, Viktor Szabó in the State Research Library), have analyzed Lesskó’s brief remarks and photographs. After research of the relevant documents in the Military History Archives in Budapest and in the War Archives of the Austrian State Archives in Vienna, they have published a brief, but certainly not insignificant, work of 112 pages. The monograph, inter alia very important to a wider readership, written in the Slovak language with texts translated into Serbian and English, was published by the East Slovakian Museum in Košice at the end of 2019.The text is divided into four parts. In the first chapter, entitled “Serbia and Belgrade in the Years 1915–1916,” Martin Jarinkovič, one of the authors, with the aid of relevant secondary literature, presents an overview of the military situation in Serbia at the beginning of WWI with an emphasis on the Austro-Hungarian occupation in October 1915. As the preserved materials from the Military History Archives in Budapest show, the military general government in Serbia was established on January 1, 1916. It had the principal function, apart from maintaining security, of keeping roads and railways open to uninterrupted transport for military and economic purposes, of organizing the internment of the Serbian population, and of overseeing the economic exploitation of the country. Precisely in that period of the establishment and reinforcement of the Austro-Hungarian occupational administration in central, western, and southwestern Serbia (other parts of the Kingdom of Serbia [i.e., the eastern and southeastern parts, including a large part of Kosovo and present-day North Macedonia] were occupied by Bulgaria), Army physician and Košice native Jenő Lesskó happened to be in Belgrade.In the second short chapter (“The Album of Jenő Lesskó”), Martin Jarinkovič describes some technical details regarding the photo album, which contains a total of 24 photographs capturing the situation in occupied Belgrade at the turn of 1915/1916. The idea that led the authors of this monograph to decide that Jenő Lesskó was the photographer of the aforementioned photographs was confirmed by the fact that a photo of him appears first of all in the album, with his name written below it. He also appears again in the following photograph. As Martin Jarinkovič stresses, each photograph in this album is accompanied by a descriptive caption written in the same careful handwriting. The descriptions were written in Hungarian, except for one photograph, the caption of which was written in German on the front and the back of the photo. In the descriptions of the Belgrade buildings and locations, Jenő Lesskó mostly uses Serbian names as well.The third chapter by Viktor Szabó is essentially a biography of Jenő Lesskó. As already mentioned, Jenő Lesskó was born in Košice in 1890. In 1913, he graduated from the University of Sciences in Budapest as a Doctor of Medicine. At the beginning of WWI, he served as an Army doctor in the Austro-Hungarian Army, first on the Russian front, and after that on the Serbian and later the Italian front. In 1917–1918 he was employed in the Dermatology and Venerology Departments of the 7th Garrison Hospital in Graz. As mentioned by Viktor Szabó, the developments of his military career during WWI are possible to follow, according to official gazettes issued regularly by the individual Hungarian Royal Ministries. Although the monograph is based on the military service of Jenő Lesskó in WWI, particularly during his stay in Serbia (November 1915–May 1916), Viktor Szabó also briefly describes the later career of Lesskó in interwar Hungary, when he became one of the leading Hungarian doctors in the field of dermatology. On February 6, 1945, during fighting in the streets of Budapest, Jenő Lesskó was fatally shot. Viktor Szabó emphasizes that, despite archival research, it has not been possible to establish the specific circumstances of Lesskó’s death.The final and, at the same time, longest part of the monograph is the chapter entitled “The War Album.” As previously mentioned, the War Album of Jenő Lesskó comprises a total of 24 photographs. Some of these show the wartime destruction in Belgrade (before the occupation of the Serbian metropolis, the Austro-Hungarian Army besieged and bombarded the city in October 1915). These include the photograph of destroyed buildings in King Petar’s Street in downtown Belgrade, and the building of the Army General Staff and barracks building at Kalemegdan Fortress. A similar situation is illustrated by the photograph that shows Jenő Lesskó in front of a hospital emergency department. The building behind him had been damaged by artillery fire. The consequences of the siege and bombing of Belgrade are also depicted in the photographs showing the confiscated Serbian cannons, as well as in the photo of Serbian soldiers held as prisoners of war in a POW camp, probably on the outskirts of Belgrade. The latter photo shows the inhuman conditions of the camp inmates, commented on by Jenő Lesskó with the laconic caption: “Cattle and Stalls.” Some other photographs depict a few well-known buildings still to be seen in present-day Belgrade: The Old and New Court—the Serbian Royal residences, the building of the National Bank, the statue of Prince Mihailo Obrenović in the vicinity of the National Museum and the National Theater, and some buildings at Kalemegdan Fortress. In the presentation of the wartime atmosphere, besides the already mentioned images of wartime destruction, probably the most important are those photos connected with the Orthodox celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany organized on January 19, 1916, by the Austro-Hungarian occupation authorities. This was a very important social and religious event that took place in the streets of central Belgrade and on the banks of the Sava River.All photographs are accompanied by descriptive captions of that time by Jenő Lesskó and by contemporary comments by Martin Jarinkovič, one of the authors of the monograph. Such comments offer readers a better picture of all the previously mentioned events and a description of the photographed subjects. Regarding the celebrations of the Feast of the Epiphany, Martin Jarinkovič stresses the social and religious importance of such an event for the Serbian people, but also its propagandistic character in those times. The Austro-Hungarian occupation authorities tried to involve as large a number of citizens as possible as participants during the aforementioned celebrations. As Martin Jarinkovič rightly assumes, it was most likely that this celebration was meant to be a kind of symbolic blessing for the occupation authorities, because on this holy day, some representatives of the Serbian Orthodox Church took part in the celebrations. In that way, the fate of the Serbian nation was submitted into the hands of the Austro-Hungarian military governor general. It is important to emphasize that a very propagandistic report about this event was published in the collaborationist newspaper, Beogradske Novine (Belgrade Newspaper), on January 20, 1916, but without any photos of the celebrations. For that reason, the total of five photographs taken by Jenő Lesskó of the aforementioned event on January 19, 1916, in Belgrade are probably unique today.The publication is technically also very good. The authors attempt to present the War Album according to the original version of the photographs, as well as the cover with floral decorations. The list of the wartime service of Jenő Lesskó during WWI is also well presented. However, there is no bibliography at the end of the publication of the literature and sources used. This information can be found by readers in the footnotes.The formerly unknown and unpublished War Album of Jenő Lesskó offers readers an original wartime record and illustrates the atmosphere in one occupied city in WWI, especially during the previously mentioned celebrations of the Feast of the Epiphany, as well as some images of a few Belgrade buildings, some of which even exist today (e.g., the monument of Karađorđe Petrović, leader of the first Serbian anti-Turkish uprising in 1804–1813 in the park of Kalemegdan Fortress, demolished in 1916 by the Austro-Hungarian occupation authorities; the barracks building in the same complex of Kalemegdan Fortress). Some buildings are depicted as having a different appearance in the past than they do today (e.g., Jenő Lesskó’s photo of the new Serbian Assembly, the construction of which had begun in 1907, but was interrupted by the Balkans Wars and WWI).At the same time, such a publication reveals the almost forgotten experiences of one person, an ordinary man during an extraordinary time. As Martin Jarinkovič stresses in the text, the War Album of Jenő Lesskó was created as a result of Lesskó’s enthusiasm for photography. However, today it simultaneously links two apparently distant points on the map of Europe: Košice and Belgrade. More than 100 years after the events depicted in the photographs, this still seems to be true.

IntroductionThey shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.Recited at many Anzac and Remembrance Day services, ‘The Ode’, an excerpt from a poem by Laurence Binyon, speaks of a timelessness within the inexorable march of time. When we memorialise those for whom time no longer matters, time stands still. Whether those who died in service of their country have finally “beaten time” or been forced to acknowledge that “their time on earth was up”, depends on your preference for clichés. Time and death are natural bedfellows. War memorials, be they physical or digital, declare a commitment to “remember them”. This article will compare and contrast the purpose of, and community response to, virtual and physical war memorials. It will examine whether virtual war memorials are a sign of the times – a natural response to the internet era. If, as Marshall McLuhan says, the medium is the message, what experiences do we gain and lose through online war memorials?Physical War MemorialsDuring and immediately after the First World War, physical war memorials were built in almost every city, town and village of the Allied countries involved in the war. They served many purposes. One of the roles of physical war memorials was to keep the impact of war at the centre of a town’s consciousness. In a regional centre like Bathurst, in New South Wales, the town appears to be built around the memorial – the court, council chambers, library, churches and pubs gather around the war memorials.Similarly, in small towns such as Bega, Picton and Kiama, war memorial arches form a gateway to the town centre. It is an architectural signal that you are entering a community that has known pain, death and immense loss. Time has passed, but the names of the men and women who served remain etched in stone: “lest we forget”.The names are listed in a democratic fashion: usually in alphabetical order without their rank. However, including all those who offered their service to “God, King and Country” (not just those who died) also had a more sinister and divisive effect. It reminded communities of those “eligibles” in their midst whom some regarded as “shirkers”, even if they were conscientious objectors or needed to stay and continue vital industries, like farming (Inglis & Phillips 186).Ken Inglis (97) estimated that every second Australian family was in mourning after the Great War. Jay Winter (Sites 2) goes further arguing that “almost every family” in the British Commonwealth was grieving, either for a relative; or for a friend, work colleague, neighbour or lover. Nations were traumatised. Physical war memorials provided a focal point for that universal grief. They signalled, through their prominence in the landscape or dominance of a hilltop, that it was acceptable to grieve. Mourners were encouraged to gather around the memorial in a public place, particularly on Anzac Day and Remembrance Day each year. Grief was seen, observed, respected.Such was the industrial carnage of the Western Front, that about one third of Australia and New Zealand’s fatal casualties were not brought home. Families lost a family member, body and soul, in the Great War. For those people who subscribed to a Victorian view of death, who needed a body to grieve over, the war memorial took on the role of a gravesite and became a place where people would place a sprig of wattle, poke a poppy into the crevice beside a name, or simply touch the letters etched or embossed in the stone (Winter, Experience 206). As Ken Inglis states: “the statue on its pedestal does stand for each dead man whose body, identified or missing, intact or dispersed, had not been returned” to his home town (11).Physical war memorials were also a place where women could forge new identities over time. Women accepted, or claimed their status as war widows, grieving mothers or bereft fiancés, while at the same time coming to terms with their loss. As Joy Damousi writes: “mourning of wartime loss involved a process of sustaining both a continuity with, and a detachment from, a lost soldier” (1). Thus, physical war memorials were transitional, liminal spaces.Jay Winter (Sites 85) believes that physical war memorials were places to both honour and mourn the dead, wounded, missing and shell-shocked. These dual functions of both esteeming and grieving those who served was reinforced at ceremonies, such as Anzac or Remembrance Day.As Joy Damousi (156) and Ken Inglis (457, 463) point out, war memorials in Australia are rarely sites of protest, either for war widows or veterans campaigning for a better pension, or peace activists who opposed militarism. When they are used in this way, it makes headlines in the news (Legge). They are seldom used to highlight the tragedy, inhumanity or futility of war. The exception to this, were the protests against the Vietnam War.The physical war memorials which mushroomed in Australian country towns and cities after the First World War captured and claimed those cataclysmic four years for the families and communities who were devastated by the war. They provided a place to both honour and mourn those who served, not just once, but for as long as the memorial remained. They were also a place of pilgrimage, particularly for families who did not have a grave to visit and a focal point for the annual rituals of remembrance.However, over the past 100 years, some unmaintained physical war memorials are beginning to look like untended graves. They have become obstacles rather than sentinels in the landscape. Laurence Aberhart’s haunting photographs show that memorials in places like Dorrigo in rural New South Wales “go largely unnoticed year-round, encroached on by street signage and suburbia” (Lakin 49). Have physical war memorials largely fulfilled their purpose and are they becoming obsolete? Perhaps they have been supplanted by the gathering space of the 21st century: the Internet.Digital War MemorialsThe centenary of the Great War heralded a mushrooming of virtual war memorials. Online First World War memorials focus on collecting and amassing information that commemorates individuals. They are able to include far more information than will fit on a physical war memorial. They encourage users to search the digitised records that are available on the site and create profiles of people who served. While they deal in records from the past, they are very much about the present: the user experience and their connection to their ancestors who served.The Imperial War Museum’s website Lives of the First World War asks users to “help us build the permanent digital memorial to all who contributed during the First World War”. This request deserves scrutiny. Firstly, “permanent” – is this possible in the digital age? When the head of Google, Vint Cerf, disclosed in 2015 that software programming wizards were still grappling with how to create digital formats that can be accessed in 10, 100 or a 1000 years’ time; and recommended that we print out our precious digital data and store it in hard copy or risk losing it forever; then it appears that online permanency is a mirage.Secondly, “all who contributed” – the website administrators informed me that “all” currently includes people who served with Canada and Britain but the intention is to include other Commonwealth nations. It seems that the former British Empire “owns” the First World War – non-allied, non-Commonwealth nations that contributed to the First World War will not be included. One hundred years on, have we really made peace with Germany and Turkey? The armistice has not yet spread to the digital war memorial. The Lives of the First world War website missed an opportunity to be leaders in online trans-national memorialisation.Discovering Anzacs, a website built by the National Archives of Australia and Archives New Zealand, is a little more subdued and honest, as visitors are invited to “enhance a profile dedicated to the wartime journey of someone who served”.Physical and online war memorials can work in tandem. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Victoria created a website that provides background information on the military service of the 159 members of the legal profession who are named on their Memorial board. This is an excellent example of a digital medium expanding on and reinvigorating a physical memorial.It is noteworthy that all of these online memorial websites commemorate those who served in the First World War, and sometimes the Boer or South African War. There is no space for remembering those who served or died in more recent wars like Afghanistan or Iraq. James Brown and others discuss how the cult of Anzac is overshadowing the service and sacrifices of the men and women who have been to more recent wars. The proximity of their service mitigates against its recognition – it is too close for comfortable, detached remembrance.Complementary But Not ExclusiveA comparison of their functions indicates that online memorials which focus on the First World War complement, but will never replace the role of physical war memorials. As discussed, physical war memorials were sites for grieving, pilgrimage and collectively honouring the men and women who served and died. Online websites which allow users to upload scanned documents and photographs; transcribe diary entries or letters; post tribute poems, songs or video clips; and provide links to other relevant records online are neither places of pilgrimage nor sites for grieving. They are about remembrance, not memory (Scates, “Finding” 221).Ken Inglis describes physical war memorials as “bearers of collective memory” (7). In a sense, online war memorials are keepers of individual, user-enhanced archival records. It can be argued that online memorials to the First World War tap into the desire for hero-worship, the boom in family history re

The Dictator's Photo Albums: Private and Public Photographs in the Metaxas-Dictatorship The Greek authoritarian «Fourth of August Regime» (1936–1941) focussed in its propaganda on promoting the dictator Ioannis Metaxas as father, grandfather and «First peasant» and while in foreign policy the close ties to the Balkan Entente was advertised, the transfer of ideas from the European fascist regimes was negated. By examining 57 photo albums preserved today in the Hellenic Parliament Archives the article discusses photo albums as a source for the interpretation of the Metaxas dictatorship and as a source for the history of photography in Greece. It examines the private photo album aesthetics and its use in three official brochures with an exceptional high amount of photographs: Fourth of August 1936–1938, Fourth of August 1938–1939 and Four Years of Government by I. Metaxas, 1936–1940. The article's main argument is, that due to their photo album aesthetic the propaganda brochures were invoking the intimacy of a family album.

This article looks at a photographic album produced by the German police in colonial Namibia just before World War I. Late 19th- and early 20th-century police photography has often been interpreted as a form of visual production that epitomized power and regimes of surveillance imposed by the state apparatuses on the poor, the criminal and the Other. On the other hand police and prison institutions became favored sites where photography could be put at the service of the emergent sciences of the human body—physiognomy, anthropometry and anthropology. While the conjuncture of institutionalized colonial state power and the production of scientific knowledge remain important for this Namibian case study, the article explores a slightly different set of questions. Echoing recent scholarship on visuality and materiality the photographic album is treated as an archival object and visual narrative that was at the same time constituted by and constitutive of material and discursive practices within early 20th-century police and prison institutions in the German colony. By shifting attention away from image content and visual codification alone toward the question of visual practice the article traces the ways in which the photo album, with its ambivalent, unstable and uncontained narrative, became historically active and meaningful. Therein the photographs were less informed by an abstract theory of anthropological and racial classification but rather entrenched with historically contingent processes of colonial state constitution, socioeconomic and racial stratification, and the institutional integration of photography as a medium and a technology into colonial policing. The photo album provides a textured sense of how fragmented and contested these processes remained throughout the German colonial period, but also how photography could offer a means of transcending the limits and frailties brought by the realities on the ground.

Previous studies of First World War photography focus on soldiers’ experiences and professional photographers’ work, with little attention paid to women’s ‘amateur’ war photography. Canadian trained nurses’ photo albums and scrapbooks provide a rich, layered, and gendered resource for understanding how these professional women commemorated their overseas war experiences. This study examines nurses’ visual interpretations of their wars, studying narrative arc, sequencing, page design, and patterns to show how nurses visually validated their work, protected patients yet demonstrated their successful healing, dealt with ongoing emotional trauma and displacement, and envisioned the war in their lifetime experiences. Through nurses’ eyes and through their visions, we see the specific and gendered interpretations they gave to their wars.

Ruby’s Oyster Dressing, or Edible Nostalgia

Reviewed by: Durchhalten und Überleben an der Westfront. Raum und Körper im Ersten Weltkrieg by Christoph Nübel Adam T. Rosenbaum Durchhalten und Überleben an der Westfront. Raum und Körper im Ersten Weltkrieg. By Christoph Nübel. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2014. Pp. ix + 484. Cloth €44.90. ISBN 978-3506780836. Over one hundred years have passed since the outbreak of World War I, a conflict that marked the beginning of “the short twentieth century” (Hobsbawm) and “the modern age” (Eksteins). Unprecedented in its scope and destructiveness, the Great War has occupied scholars for decades. Classic works have addressed a variety of topics, including the sequence of diplomatic exchanges, the motives of the protagonists, and the escalation of the arms race, while more recent scholarship has directed our attention to propaganda and public opinion, the experience of the home front, and the profound cultural impact of four years of war. New research continues to illuminate previously underappreciated dimensions of the conflict, demonstrating a lingering fascination with World War I while also telling us something about the historian’s craft. With the right sources and analytical framework, a skillful historian can still say something new about even the most well-trodden topics. Christoph Nübel demonstrates exactly that with his new book about the German experience on the western front. In this rich and extensively researched monograph (featuring a bibliography of no less than 70 pages), Nübel demonstrates how the [End Page 210] so-called spatial turn can shed new light on World War I. More specifically, he examines different manifestations and conceptions of space (Raum) along the western front in three separate essays that focus on environment, terrain, and landscape respectively. The author justifies this unique approach by emphasizing that the soldiers themselves thought in spatial terms as they dealt with a hostile environment, mapped and navigated unfamiliar terrain, and contemplated and invented landscapes. More importantly, Nübel argues that space reveals how soldiers made sense of the war, and in many cases, how they persevered and survived (25). Thus, “space” is not just a buzzword but rather the key to a better understanding of the experience of trench warfare. In order to substantiate this ambitious hypothesis, Nübel turns to a wide variety of sources, including official military documents, reports from soldiers, diaries, letters, photo albums, drawings, and maps. He also adopts an interdisciplinary approach, utilizing the insights of anthropologists, ethnologists, psychologists, philosophers, and other scholars to interpret this broad range of evidence. The organization of the book is logical and the prose is direct, with each of the major sections concluding with a concise summary of Nübel’s conclusions. In his discussion of the environment of the western front, he emphasizes the omnipresent cold and wetness that defined the lives of many soldiers, leading him to convincingly claim that the greatest burdens of trench warfare were associated with environmental factors and not necessarily combat itself (97). Moreover, the dangerous conditions of life in the trenches compelled a host of civilian and military experts to develop tactics of survival and perseverance, while some claimed that the same conditions could transform soldiers, potentially reversing the degeneration that afflicted prewar society. On the subject of the terrain, Nübel describes how the land itself inevitably shaped both the experience of combat and military tactics, which changed drastically after the soldiers “dug in.” Especially useful is the short case study of a 1916 battle involving the 15th Bavarian Infantry Regiment at Neuville-Saint-Vaast. With this example, Nübel confirms that the military leadership went to great lengths to educate their troops on the topographical goals and obstacles of the battlefield. In practice, however, the individual soldiers only came into contact with a tiny portion of the terrain, reflecting, in the author’s words, “the industrial division of labor” (206). In the section on landscape, Nübel argues that carefully constructed images of the Heimat and Kriegslandschaft could alleviate and potentially rationalize the suffering of German soldiers. This is a logical argument, and the author does provide an interesting analysis of how soldiers comprehended the scenery of the western front itself, which was described alternately as a devastated landscape...

When creating a photo album of an event, people typically select a few important images to keep or share. There is some consistency in the process of choosing the important images, and discarding the unimportant ones. Modeling this selection process will assist automatic photo selection and album summarization. In this paper, we show that the selection of important images is consistent among different viewers, and that this selection process is related to the event type of the album. We introduce the concept of event-specific image importance. We collected a new event album dataset with human annotation of the relative image importance with each event album. We also propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based method to predict the image importance score of a given event album, using a novel rank loss function and a progressive training scheme. Results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms various baseline methods.

The article analyses family history and memory in the post-WWII period, as reflected in photo albums compiled by women living in what had become the Soviet-occupied country of Latvia. The content analysis method is used to examine twenty photo albums. The results indicate that such albums served as an autobiographical instrument for women in the private sphere of everyday life. The principal thematic categories of photographs in the albums were everyday scenes, portraits of individuals, photos of infants and children, pictures of family rituals, portraits of young men performing their obligatory military service in the Soviet armed forces, group photos of families, and groups photos of festive family events. Generally, the women compilers of the albums sought to place photographs in chronological sequence, but interruptions of a sequence are visible by the inclusion of photographs from the pre-Soviet decades. Most of the albums are incomplete and contain many unmounted photos, which testifies to autobiographical instability and the need for editing to make albums conform to the ideological demands of the Soviet decades. Interpretation of the albums from the post-memory viewpoint suggests the necessity for contextual historical information, since their female compilers were evidently creating their own mythology about these post-war decades. The albums portray a society with strong family values, orderly networks of family relationships, mutual trust, prosperity, and ‘the good life’ – all of which stood in sharp contrast with the everyday realities of Soviet-era existence.

Apart from the Mainstream:James Castle Karen Wilkin (bio) What compels someone to make art? The question remains fascinating and perplexing. We can invoke the simplest—and possibly truest—explanation and say that it's a fundamental characteristic of what makes us human, citing Paleolithic cave art to prove the point, but in the 1950s, the French art historian and critic (and archaeologist, resistance fighter, politician, and novelist) André Malraux suggested a more precise answer. "What makes the artist," he maintained, "is that in his youth he was more deeply moved by his visual experience of works of art than by that of the things they represent—and perhaps of Nature as a whole." The notion seems plausible, perhaps because of its similarity to the notion of "imprinting," the phenomenon described by animal behaviour specialists about the same time that Malraux published his once widely read book; researchers found that newly hatched goslings, for example, regard the first thing they see as their mother and will follow whatever or whoever it is, whether avian, human, or anything else. Since art is often about other art as much as it as about appearances, the natural world, or emotions, whether the connection takes the form of refutation, questioning, or expanding the ideas posited by the "other art," Malraux's theory that the desire to make art is itself generated by existing art appears credible: a sensitive young person is "imprinted" at a formative age by a painting or a sculpture, so that, like goslings following a surrogate parent, the future painter or sculptor remains more impressed by the work of art than by real experience. Yet Malraux's seemingly persuasive formulation is wholly inadequate when we try to apply it to those remarkable men and women [End Page 277] who are driven to paint or draw or to make sculpture without having had any crucial, early encounters with significant works of art—or with any works of art at all. The history of recent modernism is full of examples. The sculptor David Smith to name only one, grew up in the Midwest before the start of the World War I. He recalled that although he was interested in an illustrated Bible, as a child, and received praise for modelling a lion in clay, he had never seen any art in Decatur, Indiana, where he spent his boyhood, or in Paulding, Ohio, where his family moved when he was 15, "other than some very, very dark picture with sheep in it in the public library." But Smith knew that he wanted to be an artist. And there are many other examples, most notably the histories of self-taught vernacular artists such as James Castle (1899–1977). Castle is an enigma. Born profoundly deaf in rural Idaho, he spent his entire life on the family farm. Since he was not sent to a special school for the deaf until the age of 10—much too late, according to experts in teaching the hearing-impaired—he never acquired speech or learned to read. As far as anyone knows, the closest thing to "art" that he experienced in his silent world came from newspaper and magazine illustrations, mail order catalogues, cartoons and advertisements, even the decorations on commercial packaging—his parents ran the local post office, at one point—yet image-making was his sole, lifelong preoccupation and his main means of communication. Castle spent all of his time making art. Exempt from farm chores (he is said to have refused to participate), he retreated to his "studio," first an unused chicken coop, later a trailer, devoting himself to drawing haunting, poetic landscapes and interiors notable for their convincing perspective and sensitivity to tonality, to making constructions of animals, stylized people, and objects, and to creating hand-drawn "books" and "photo albums," adopting, first out of necessity and later by choice, scavenged paper and home-brewed mediums. Most mysterious are his hand-drawn "books," "photo albums," and word pieces, [End Page 278] with their inexplicable letters and "messages." Another mystery is the difference between Castle's moody, naturalistic farmyards and interiors and his rigid, frontal renditions of people. It's usually impossible to decide whether he...

While collecting family photographs of some of the 2.5 million Indians who fought in World War II on behalf of their British colonizer, this article's author, an artist, found that the idea of photographic “ubiquity” was turned on its head. She became increasingly aware of how socioeconomic privilege, caste, and class played a role in who was never photographed and thus who is not represented in the history of photography, in photo albums, and in military archives. Three different installations titled The UNREMEMBERED: Indian Soldiers of World War II include the use family photographs and archival footage. In this article, the artist explores questions about who is not represented in photo albums and archives and approaches to remedying their absence.

The paths of Russia and Spain crossed several times in the 20th century. The Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 has always been and remains a topic that attracts the attention of experts and influences the development of a multifaceted cultural dialogue between the two countries. The events of those years contributed greatly to shaping the image of Spain in the Soviet Union. In recent decades, a number of works have been published, exploring not only the image of Spain in the USSR in the 1930s, but also the image of the enemy, which emerged as the first direct military confrontation with fascist regimes took place. An important topic analyzed in these works is the tools of visual securitization, which involves the formation of the enemy image by visual means. This paper is based on the materials included in the photo album ¡No pasaran! They will not pass! published by the Central Committee of the Komsomol in 1937. This source traditionally falls into the category of photo journalism. It is a type of source that is not examined much in literature, yet it is interesting as it combines visual images and verbal characteristics that reinforce stereotypical perceptions and key mythologems relevant to that period. The material illustrates how the image of Spain took shape in the USSR during the Civil War and how the image of the enemy emerged before World War II. The album was published as part of a pro-Spain campaign in the Soviet Union, when the Republican faction was still believed to win soon. The verbal content of the album is stronger than the images in terms of impact, although it is usually the visual content that is more impactful. Unlike poster art with its potential for visual securitization, a photo album, which combines extensive textual material with low-quality images, reinforces stereotypical ideas by combining these two sources of information, with the obvious dominance of the former.

The photo album of the region surrounding the town of Beroun featuring images by Jiří Jeníček, dating back to 1973, reflects the atmos­phere and circumstances of the Czech photography scene under the influence of World War II. During the interwar and post-war period, the amateur photographer, filmmaker and theoretician Jiří Jeníček was one of the key personalities of Czech photography and film. His influence extended to both amateur clubs and the modernist avant-garde tendencies in interwar photography, which fundamentally influenced Czech photography. Jeníček’s photo album with motifs of the town of Beroun and the surrounding landscape emphasises strong emotional content through neutral themes. The paper examines the role of Czech photography during the Second World War within the socio-cultural context in response to the challenging circumstances and how it was interpreted after 1945.

Reviews 247 Braudeau, Michel. Place des Vosges. Paris: Seuil, 2017. ISBN 978-2-02-134295-6. Pp. 152. The beautiful, once-royal square invoked in Braudeau’s title points less to a classy neighborhood than to a crucible in time and place that contains many of the basic elements that made of the author a writer, and a prolific one at that. The era in question is the 1970s, a period deeply marked by May 68, but somewhat directionless in its aftermath. The author, clear-eyed and articulate, documents his own weaving path through the decade and among the famous inhabitants of the comparably famous place. Thus the young writer that he was experiments randomly with alcohol and the drugs of that decade’s choice; he travels, sometimes to exotic destinations, but without experiencing any profound epiphanies; and he dabbles in a number of light-hearted sexual relationships, grazing the possibility of genuine intimacy only a very few times. The descriptor of this text as a récit could not be more perfect: Braudeau recounts story upon story, as though paging through a photo album. His connections at the time to Jean Cayrol, chief literary consultant at Éditions du Seuil, gave him additional access to a constellation of the intellectuals of that age: Sollers, Barthes, Lacan, Sarduy. The cameo portraits he offers reveal a keen eye for character-revealing detail: William Burroughs had “un rire très court, un hoquet sarcastique, comme du gravier dans un arrosoir, et un haussement d’épaules [...] de tous les maîtres à dé-penser [...] il était l’un des plus mystérieusement sages”(48–49). The young writer also gets caught up in the aura of one extravagant and unpredictable Thomas, who he later learns is the son of Veit Harlan, creator of the infamous Juif Süss, anti-Semitic film of the 1940s. This lifemaiming accident of Thomas’s birth gives Braudeau insight into “sa personnalité si forte et malheureuse” (92). For this reader, the most touching admission of the book comes as the young writer fears that writing novels after the two great wars seems a naïve and potentially bootless enterprise, that the French language of novelists is archaic, useless, and forgettable. That Braudeau defied the literary Zeitgeist of the 1970s by writing more than twenty novels and that he made a career of defending literary language (not the least as editor-in-chief of the Nouvelle Revue Française) is a fitting postscript to Place. As for the book itself, situated in a pre-history of formative encounters with a vibrant generation of thinkers, it combines the uncertainty of an age with the sure writing of a master. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March Bruneau,André. Sourde rancœur. Québec: Apothéose, 2016. ISBN 978-2-89775-0329 . Pp. 406. Julien Poirier is a dedicated Montreal police investigator whose meticulous approach to crime-solving usually allows him to forget the frustrations that gnaw at ...

BackgroundIt is believed that total reported suicide rates tend to decrease during wartime. However, analysis of suicide rates during recent conflicts suggests a more complex picture, with increases in some age groups and changes in method choice. As few age and gender specific analyses of more distant conflicts have been conducted, it is not clear if these findings reflect a change in the epidemiology of suicide in wartime. Therefore, we examined suicide rates in Scotland before, during and after the Second World War to see if similar features were present.MethodsData on deaths in Scotland recorded as suicide during the period 1931 – 1952, and population estimates for each of these years, were obtained from the General Register Office for Scotland. Using computer spreadsheets, suicide rates by gender, age and method were calculated. Forward stepwise logistic regression was used to assess the effect of gender, war and year on suicide rates using SAS V8.2.ResultsThe all-age suicide rate among both men and women declined during the period studied. However, when this long-term decline is taken into account, the likelihood of suicide during the Second World War was higher than during both the pre-War and post-War periods. Suicide rates among men aged 15–24 years rose during the Second World War, peaking at 148 per million (41 deaths) during 1942 before declining to 39 per million (10 deaths) by 1945, while the rate among men aged 25–34 years reached 199 per million (43 deaths) during 1943 before falling to 66 per million (23 deaths) by 1946. This was accompanied by an increase in male suicides attributable to firearms and explosives during the War years which decreased following its conclusion.ConclusionAll age male and female suicide rates decreased in Scotland during World War II. However, once the general background decrease in suicide rates over the whole period is accounted for, the likelihood of suicide among the entire Scottish population during the Second World War was elevated. The overall decrease in suicide rates concealed large increases in younger male age groups during the War years, and an increase in male suicides recorded as due to the use of firearms. We conclude that the effects of war on younger people, reported in recent conflicts in Central Europe, were also seen in Scotland during the Second World War. The results support the findings of studies of recent conflicts which have found a heterogeneous picture with respect to age specific suicide rates during wartime.