H Lewis Allways

dans240z:

Clairton, PA

Rolleicord IV, Fuji Astia 100F

mills:

The wonderful CK/CK shared this photograph, taken near London in November of 1942. Breaking between missions flying machines less sophisticated than a contemporary car in a war of annihilation with a nearby and superior enemy, a pilot breaks for a haircut, reading, and a pipe. The insistence on the accouterments of culture, on leisure —the book and pipe, of course, but also the nearly formal attire of the barber and the pattern of the sheet wrapped around his shoulders— seems so British, so laudable, so impossible to imagine today for innumerable reasons one hardly has the energy even to consider.

Alfred G Buckham
Aerial view of Edinburgh
about 1920
Medium Silver gelatine print
Size 45.80 x 37.80 cm
Scottish National Galleries

Buckham had crashed nine times before he was discharged from the Royal Naval Air Service as a hundred per cent disabled. Continuing to indulge his passion for aerial photography, he wrote that ‘If one’s right leg is tied to the seat with a scarf or a piece of rope, it is possible to work in perfect security’. Presumably these were the perilous conditions in which the photographer took this dazzling picture of Edinburgh.

Exclamated exhalation underscore gasp. Photography!