Picturing History: Slightly out of Focus

[baleanoptera]

Sometimes we forget how a thing looks. The precise details of an event or the faces of people we knew. Memory can be a fickle thing. But we are in luck, because we have things that can remind us, we have words, films and photographs that can show us how things were. Right?

Comments

[alexandral]

Oh, this is such an interesting post (as always)!! It is funny, but I immediately thought of "Saving Private Ryan" when I saw first picture. Apart from all, D-day always fascinates me - "What could have been if Hitler didn't hesitate and attacked the British troops immediately?" . This is such a key moment where everything could have gone very different way.

[baleanoptera]

Oh, this is such an interesting post (as always)!!

Huzzah! :D I was a little worried that this would only be of interest to me. I think I'm currently a little obsessed with how real life influences fiction (aka Robert Capa pictures influences Saving Private Ryan) and how fiction influences real life (aka how Band of Brothers gets shown as a documentary).

And D-day is fascinating. So many things could have gone wrong, and nearly did. But then again both the first and second world war is so pivotal to understanding our closest history, that for me these periods become almost automatically interesting.

And I still cannot get over the fact that Robert Capa thought it was a good idea to go with the soldiers. Yes,it gave us a lot of amazing photographs - but he must have been a little mad. ;)