28 August 2013

Appearance.


In the early 1930s, a woman claiming to be the widow of a Royal Flying Corps pilot produced these photographs of scenes of aerial combat during World War I. Her late husband, she claimed, had defied the RFC’s regulations and mounted a camera on his plane, tying its shutter action to his machine gun. The resulting series of images was the only available up-close visual representation of British and German planes firing upon each other, aircraft catching on fire, and pilots falling from the sky.

During WWI, camera technology simply hadn’t progressed to a point where it was possible to take an accurate photograph of dogfighting. Meanwhile, the public was rabidly curious about the new kind of warfare. The appearance of “Mrs. Gladys Maud Cockburne-Lange” and her trove of photographs neatly bridged this gap ...

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