During World War II, iconic pictures portrayed Americans serving the war effort either in uniform or at home as defense plant workers. The government needed to convince factory owners to switch to making materials of war while convincing individuals to take factory jobs.
Powerful images during this time inspired collective action on a massive scale. Men and women were surrounded by messages from billboards to posters to leaflets urging them to do their patriotic duty. Since many American men were serving in uniform, these messages needed to convince women to roll up their sleeves and join the industrial workforce.
Photographs by people like Alfred T. Palmer fueled a workforce of nearly five million American women to power up U.S. defense plants by normalizing and encouraging their work in those factories to help the war effort.
As a result, women factory workers built or helped to build an estimated 300,000 aircraft needed to help the Allied Forces win the war.
While photographs by Margaret Bourke-White in Life Magazine were often singled-out as critical to the effort, two New Mexico State University journalism professors wrote a book about Palmer, a lesser-known photographer, whose massive collection of morale-boosting images in both black and white and color portrayed a confident nation readying itself for defense.
The book, authored by Mary M. Cronin and Bruce Berman, is titled, "Home Front: Alfred T. Palmer's World War II Photography." Published this year during the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, the two professors actually stumbled across Palmer's photography three years ago and began researching Palmer's history and restoring his photos.
"Back in 2022, I found his daughter Julia Palmer who was in her eighties and sharp as a tack," said Mary Lamonica, NMSU journalism professor who publishes under the name Mary M. Cronin. "She invited me up to her home in Klamath Falls, Oregon. She had all his archives, and we went through all his World War II stuff."
Palmer was hired by the federal government and worked for several agencies, including the Office of Emergency Management and the Office of War Information to take home front photos of Americans preparing for war. Palmer's images were meant to resonate with the public on an emotional level. The subjects, which included defense plant workers, soldiers engaged in training and civilians in a variety of occupations, frequently were not unidentified.
While Lamonica researched Palmer's life, his letters and his vast collection of visual images, Berman delved into the entire Library of Congress collection, selected Palmer's images for the book, and worked on those images, to bring them back to life. Palmer shot mostly on Kodachrome, a process only a few years old by the early 1940s.
The book features 110 photos, mostly color with 20 black and white. There are thousands more of Palmer's works archived in the Library of Congress. When Palmer was in the Merchant Marine in the 1920s and 1930s, he would travel to China and Japan and the island nations of the South Pacific and shoot photos of everything from fishermen to street scenes and sell them to newspapers and magazines like National Geographic. Some of those photos also are included in the book.
Shooting precision photos with Palmer's cameras was no easy feat. He used mostly the cumbersome, over-sized Graflex and Speed Graphic cameras. They were several times the size of a modern digital SLR camera and much heavier, requiring sheets of 5 by 7-inch or 4 by 5-inch film to be placed in the camera prior to each shot. The film was expensive so there was no room for re-takes.
Berman admired Palmer's confidence to produce such artful work with such precision without having the benefit of a preview, such as shooting a polaroid, which did not exist at the time.
"He was about 30 years ahead of his time in his style," said Berman, NMSU associate professor of journalism who teaches photography after a 40-year career as a photojournalist, many years shooting for the New York Times. "First of all, Palmer was shooting in color; second of all, he was using lighting like modern magazine photographers.
"Since all I shot was Kodachrome in my career, I knew how to bring Palmer's photos back to what I think they looked like to Palmer at that time – it was spectacular color," Berman said. "Nobody else was working like this in the forties or even the fifties. He was very aware of what he was doing. There are images there that I can't even conceive of how it was done."
Although Palmer was among several photographers whose photos played a crucial role in documenting and highlighting the contributions of women in factories during World War II, Berman pointed out he was the only photographer at that time producing such modern images.
These photos, commissioned by the Office of War Information, were widely distributed to magazines and newspapers which ended up as photo essays or accompanied articles, were displayed as posters in public places, ran as commercial advertisements, billboards and even appeared in Hollywood films.
"His letters show that he was on the road almost nonstop for three and a half years during the war," Lamonica said. "He was literally crisscrossing the country. They didn't provide him with a car, so he had to use his own car. He sometimes had trouble getting extra gas rationing or finding housing. We discovered through all sorts of government documents that there was an urgent push to get women into those factories. Palmer was one of the first to shoot women in factories and show them as still being feminine. These women were real factory workers, but he made sure their makeup was done, and their hair was right. It was propaganda but at the same time, it was beautiful."
Although Palmer's photos were shot under time constraints and limited by work going on in an active factory, his technical sophistication with light and composition told stories that resonated deeply and spurred Americans to get behind the war effort.
Berman sees Palmer's collection as more than commercial or government propaganda.
"Palmer understood that when he was looking through a camera, it was really all about what he was looking at," Berman said. "Art, by definition, has to be not only what you're looking at but also how you feel about what you're looking at. Palmer understood what's on that side of the camera is very important. In my mind, his work is an affirmation of the service of photography, serving others – when your work has a function for the greater good. Palmer absolutely had the greater good in mind."
The full article can be seen at https://newsroom.nmsu.edu/news/nmsu-professors--book-uncovers-wwii-era-photographer-s-treasure-trove/s/b2032f0c-9a0a-4892-a257-bee9fab47ded
