The First World War: A Photographic History – The First World War: A Photographic History. Edited, with the introduction and captions by Laurence Stallings. Simon and Schuster, New York, August 1933. First edition, first printing. One of the most important, influential, and groundbreaking photographic works ever published on the First World War. (Including the accompanying booklet of notes on the photographs.)
A substantial photographic volume published exactly fifteen years after the end of the First World War (1918) and in the same year that the Nazis came to power in Germany (1933). It documents the most compelling and significant scenes of the First World War from all major fronts. An early monumental work that adopts a direct, uncompromising, and unsparing documentary approach to the horrors of war, in sharp contrast to the official patriotic publications issued by the nations that participated in the conflict. The editor, Laurence Stallings, had himself served as an officer in the United States Marine Corps during the First World War. He was severely wounded at the Battle of Belleau Wood and lost a leg. Over the course of three years of intensive research, he assembled more than 500 photographs from every theater of the war – including aerial photographs, images of battlefields, casualties, and soldiers in the trenches – from both Allied and German official and private archives, many of which were published here for the first time. Numerous photographs were obtained from the photographic departments, historical sections, and war colleges of the principal powers on both sides of the conflict. Others came from photographers of the U.S. Army Signal Corps attached to the American Expeditionary Forces; similar European sources; individual participants and eyewitnesses, both professional and amateur; as well as war correspondents, newspaper photographers, commercial news agencies, books, magazines, and newspapers in the United States and abroad. The photographs are arranged chronologically and include images from the Land of Israel. At the conclusion of the volume is a collage depicting prominent leaders and powerful regimes of that critical period in Europe and the Middle East. Alongside a photograph of Adolf Hitler before a crowd of uniformed supporters appear Benito Mussolini, dictator of Fascist Italy; Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union; and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish nation and the first President of the Republic of Turkey. The book presents these four leaders together to illustrate the turbulent political reality and the rise of centralized and totalitarian regimes throughout the world in that year, perhaps suggesting that the wars were not yet over.
[10], 298, [10] pages. Early presentation inscription on the front free endpaper. Hardcover with the original dust jacket. Tears and losses to the dust jacket. good condition.
