Wartime photos

[carl_allery]

This post is really a marker for myself, but it seems an appropriate day for it. I've taken on the task of scanning and uploading (probably to Flickr) my father's wartime photos (WWII). He was an RAF photographer and so has a rather large collection of photos, most of which are unofficial and more of interest in a social history context than a

Comments

[lil_shepherd]

Oooh, these are really interesting.

[carl_allery]

Lol, I have a shoebox - well, possibly it's a shirt-box - full of the like. Mostly they've been sorted geographically, but there's so much I don't know. I always meant to interrogate my father as I'm just relying on my trivia recall of the stories he shared. He used to go through them occasionally after dinner, if I encouraged him, but he wouldn't really talk about the war without prompting and often it took getting the photos out to start him off. Now I'm not sure how much he'd remember or even if he'd be able to separate or identify the memories correctly. :(

[khiemtran]

Thanks for posting these...

[carl_allery]

I think the advantage my dad had, apart from access to paper and chemicals, was that it was his job to be wandering round with a camera in hand. Of course, the main purpose of the job was air photography, and there aren't many of those photos because he was too valuable as a trainer to be doing the basic photographic work himself. It has left us a wonderful legacy though.

[anonymous]

Those are fascinating, and it reminds me, especially the one with the ship's cat, that I have an album of photos from the commission of (IIRC) the HMS Exeter, that my great uncle Tom served on. Not all of them are properly fixed or accounted for, I should really curate them properly. I've had them since I was about ten.