WWII Photography and Wartime Historical Images

A wartime photograph is a document before it is a picture. It records a person, a place, or an event at a fixed moment, and for the historian and the collector alike its value depends on how much of that record survives on the print itself and how much can be verified against an outside source.

This page treats Second World War photography as a research and collecting subject rather than a gallery. The organizing questions are the ones a serious archive asks of any image: what kind of photograph is it, who and what does it show, when was the print made, and can any of that be confirmed. Those questions matter because the same negative can yield an original wartime print, a print struck decades later, and a modern reproduction that only looks old, and only the first of the three carries the physical evidence a researcher can trust. The method below is the same one applied across this archive's other visual holdings, from the general military photograph reference to printed posters and wartime flags.

Three kinds of wartime photograph, three kinds of evidence

Most surviving wartime images fall into a few working categories, and the category shapes how a print is read. Press photographs were made for publication and moved through a wire service or a newspaper picture desk. They tend to carry the richest documentation, because a caption slip, an agency credit stamp, and a date stamp were part of the working object. Portrait photographs were made to be kept: a studio sitting before a man shipped out or an official service portrait. They survive in large numbers with little text on them. Unit and personal snapshots were taken by servicemen with folding cameras and box cameras. They are the least documented and the most numerous, and their evidence usually lives in an album caption or a note on the back rather than in the emulsion.

Reconnaissance and official service photography sit apart again. The armed forces ran their own photographic sections, and official United States Navy photographs of the period were filed by number in what is now Record Group 80 at the National Archives, with copies held by the Naval History and Heritage Command. When a print carries one of those official numbers it can be traced to a documented negative, which is the strongest form of provenance a wartime photograph can have. Most images a collector encounters are not so tidy, which is why the physical print becomes the primary witness.

The people and places these images document

The reach of wartime photography is easiest to see through specific, well-documented subjects, each of which shows a different type of image at work. Their records are public and verifiable, which is exactly why they make good reference points.

Naval Station Treasure Island is a case of the installation as subject. The island itself is man-made, built up from bay fill in 1936 and 1937 to host the Golden Gate International Exposition, which ran on the site in 1939 and 1940. The United States Navy took the island over as the country moved toward war, leasing it in 1941 and acquiring it formally in 1942. It converted the exposition halls and piers into barracks, training space, and embarkation facilities. Treasure Island became a major West Coast processing and staging point for the Pacific, moving many thousands of personnel through its gates. Photographs of a station like this are location and logistics records, and they are dated and placed as much by the buildings and signage in the frame as by anything written on the print.

Doris Miller is a case of the official ceremony photograph. Miller was born in Waco, Texas, in 1919 and served as a mess attendant aboard the battleship USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. During the attack he helped move his mortally wounded commanding officer, Captain Mervyn Bennion, and then manned an anti-aircraft gun he had not been trained to operate. For that conduct he received the Navy Cross from Admiral Chester W. Nimitz in a ceremony held aboard USS Enterprise at Pearl Harbor on May 27, 1942, and he was the first African American sailor to be awarded it. Miller was killed in November 1943 when the escort carrier USS Liscome Bay was sunk. The official photographs of the award ceremony are a documented, catalogued record, and they show how a single posed image can anchor a person's place in the historical account.

Orson Welles is a case of press and publicity photography turned to war work. Fresh from directing Citizen Kane in 1941, Welles traveled to Brazil in 1942 to film the unfinished documentary project It's All True under the Good Neighbor Policy, sponsored through Nelson Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. He carried his morale and goodwill efforts into his radio work as well. The photographic trail he left is the publicity and news kind: studio and location images made to circulate in the press. That category is defined by its distribution, and its prints are the ones most likely to carry the agency and caption markings described below.

Dating and attributing a print

The date on a photograph is the date the print was made, which is not always the date the picture was taken. Separating the two is the core discipline of the field, and most of the evidence is physical. The dominant black-and-white process of the era was the gelatin silver print on fiber-based paper, and an aged example of it tends to show its age honestly. A slight warmth appears in the highlights, and the darkest areas carry the faint metallic sheen conservators call silver mirroring. A print that looks perfectly fresh deserves a second look.

Paper stock gives one of the firmest cutoffs available. Resin-coated papers have a plastic seal on both faces and became commercially standard only from 1968 onward. A resin-coated print therefore cannot be a wartime original, whatever the image shows. Identifying the paper base settles the question of whether a print could even be period. The Image Permanence Institute's Graphics Atlas and the Library of Congress guidance on the care and identification of photographs set out these material distinctions in detail and are the kind of authority a claim should be checked against.

Backstamps and the verso carry the rest. A press print commonly shows an agency credit stamp, such as those of the Associated Press or the wartime picture services, a date stamp applied when it crossed the picture desk, and a pasted caption slip describing the scene. What identifies and dates such a print is the accumulation of those working marks, not the image alone. Edge trim and finish add smaller clues, since a machine-cut clean edge, a deckle edge, or a scalloped postcard border each belong to particular formats and periods. None of these features is decisive by itself. Read together, and checked against an outside record, they let an archive say what it can honestly stand behind and flag what it cannot.

Period print, later strike, and outright reproduction

Three objects can share one image and differ enormously in what they are. A period print was made from the original negative close to the time of the event and carries the paper, tone, and wear of its age. A later strike was printed from a surviving negative years or decades afterward, and it is a genuine photograph on later paper rather than a fake, but it is not a wartime object and should never be described as one. A reproduction is a printed copy, and it announces itself under magnification, because a photomechanical reproduction is built from a pattern of halftone dots while a true photographic print has a continuous tone with no dot structure at all. A loupe settles that question in seconds.

Because famous subjects and dramatic moments were reprinted and reproduced for decades, the most circulated wartime images are also the ones most often misdescribed. The defense is the same every time: identify the process and the paper, read the verso, weigh how hard each feature would be to fake, and confirm the who, what, and when against a source outside the print. The related reference on blood chits and silk evasion maps applies the same evidence-first discipline to printed cloth, and the note on military photographs more generally extends the dating method to portraits and unit images. The archive home page sets out how this archive is arranged and why it states identification methods rather than unverifiable specifics.