Transporting Living Memories to the Future

Our knowledge of the past is distorted by our own patriotic or religious convictions, yet in history, as in science, all formulas are held suspect until they can be proved constant or genuine. It is within these parameters that I try to compress 2 years of researched photographs, sketches and letters, a private collection of over 300 documented photos taken during the post war years in the Philippines and Japan. This proposed thesis is a self directed study in which I try to define unknown territory. Probing beyond my own existing body of knowledge I have drawn upon and have methodically mapped out this private collection of photographic documentation from 1942 to 1946. This is a life history manuscript that preserves not only the story of an ordinary American but also, equally important, the individual act of telling the story through memoranda, correspondences, blueprints and research data. This is a private tribute to the American experience. This proposed thesis holds true to my ambitions to create a humanity enhancing interactive communication piece. Reflections upon these events far away, over fifty years ago might tend to obscure their meaning and seem to lessen their importance. The visualization of these abstractions serve as a cautionary tale. Fifty years later, the terrible destruction seen by the orphic eyes of this inconspicuous photographer has long been rebuilt. The scars on the landscape have healed worldwide, yet remain visible and unforgotten in the minds of millions on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.


With the swiftness of the technological revolution, the sheer exponential increase in the destructive power of modern nuclear weapons staggers the mind. The actual use of any modern weapon would make the leveling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki look tame in comparison. The purpose of this visualization is to transport living memories to the future, to "digitally" breathe new life and light into vintage photographs.


These vintage photographs recording random scenes of military life, have acquired a greater mystery now that their specific intention has been forgotten, their universality makes them more ominous. Sometimes detachment from context can make a photograph appear surrealistic. It seems to me that all are of these photos are haunted in some way. They look as though they were taken yesterday, but turn out to be 50 years old. These photos resonate deeply familiar aspirations and failures. It is hard not to feel a sort of queasy dislocation.


These photos have remained unattributed for 50 years. Photography especially news photography during World War II, was for so long considered a trade, not an art, that its practitioners did not bother to sign or stamp their works. Thus there is no way to find out who shot some of the most astonishing scenes in our nation’s history. The New York Times Morgue* and other national newspaper morgues are filled with millions of photographs that have been unclaimed by numerous photographers.This fact seems only now more poignant, since my father worked as a assistant editor (copy boy) for The New York Times in the late 1930’s before the Second World War. His eyes edited what he chose to see and his hands touched the same photos that my research is based upon.


Photographers or digital artists are able to see what others don’t. But once they have seen it- the viewer gets to see it, too. The camera or computer fixes the image, but beyond that, the artist’s point of view works to bring things into a new sharper focus. And in this way, the reader has become a part of the history of photojournalism. Over the years, the observer has learned to look a little harder. Much of the photography during the 1940’s concerned the war. Little of it was gruesome. Not until later in the war was the press allowed to publish photographs of American casualties. The U.S. Government controlled the way the war was photographed. It is within this timeframe that my father documented what he saw. Some photos could not be sent overseas unless they were screened by the existing U.S. military headquarters based within the Philippines and Japan at that time. But what really matters now is getting beyond the here and now, transporting the viewer to a mythical past or an imagined future. Here is where my subjective eye envisions the play of light within the vintage photos and the pixel light of the computer.


This metaphysical light which cannot be measured in scientific terms introduces us to the story of a young boy born in New York City during 1912. His lighting of the menorah in the synagogue, a symbol of Divine Light is the same light that carried him through his life and guided him to document all that he saw while stationed in the Philippines and Japan during World War II. This is a story of an unknown young man, an aviation engineer, and photographer by trade who was inducted into the Armed Forces, leaving his home, his wife and his country. This account is captured in over 300 black and white photographs. This soldier’s duty was to record with with clarity of vision the events that were unfolding. This man watched the forces of an already tumultuous world shattered by the forces of the atomic bomb. He was witness to the singed, irradiated and flayed skin peeling from the innocent survivors of the bombs that exploded over much of the Pacific. His eyes witnessed the after effects of the historic blast that burned clothes off, seared flesh and hurled an entire city unconscious. Recollections of young faces so hideously deformed that their own parents would not recognize them. It is this exact light that has brought me to establish the basis of my thesis-emanations of the light. It was also the manipulation of the light though the eye of the camera that captured the haunting images that were to develop his views of the world and indirectly my own.


*About two- thirds of the space in the New York Times morgue, which covers an entire floor of a nondescript building near Times Square, is given over to photographs, filed in nearly 1,500 drawers. Many have never been published. The files contain a great deal of wonderful writing and photos.

© Copyright 1997 Denise Urban