Photo Gallery The World of Trench Warfare in Color
Although color photography has existed since at least 1879, it didn't become popular until many decades later. The overwhelming majority of photos taken during World War I were black and white, lending the conflict a stark aesthetic which dominates our visual memory of the war.
Hans Hildenbrand, one of nineteen photographers employed by the Kaiser to document the war, was the only German to take photos of the war in color. Here, a group of German soliders stand in the ruins of Sommepy, a French village on the river Marne.
A mass grave. Some 30,000 soldiers were buried here.
Hildenbrand was "embedded" with a platoon of German troops in Champagne from June 1915 to January 1916. This photo of a military camp was published by Hildenbrand as a post card.
Hildenbrand, who first started experimenting with the "autochrome" color technique in 1909, founded a society for color photography in 1911 his native Stuttgart.
Hildenbrand's scenes are all posed, not for reasons of propaganda, but rather because the film he was working with wasn't sensitive enough to capture movement.
Hildenbrand also experimented with stereoscopic images.
A German soldier posing with a machine gun.
A scene over Hartmannsweilerkopf, in the Vosge mountain range.
Military engineers in front of a bunker in Champagne.
One of the most striking things about Hildenbrand's oeuvre is how freely he records scenes of destruction. During World War II, both sides became much pickier about what kinds of scenes they would let photographers document. During World War I, images of destroyed churches were a persistent motif.
A scene over Hartmannsweiler Kopf. When Hildenbrand went to photograph the front lines in the summer of 1916, many of the troops had been stationed around this strategic mountain for more than a year.
Winter in Alsace, 1916.
The French village Sainte-Marie-a-Py, summer 1915.
The French photographer Jule Gervais-Courtellemont, who took the following images, has up till now been better known than his German counterpart, Hans Hildenbrand.
An bird's eye view of Verdun, summer 1916. About 350,000 soliders on both sides died at Verdun over the course of that year.
Although Gervais-Courtellemont and Hildenbrand captured images for opposite sides of the war, they both ended up working for an American publication afterwards. Both became important photographers for National Geographic.
The book "Endzeit Europa" was just published this year and contains color photos from World War I.
