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Thursday, July 29, 2021

Americans in color


In their only known photograph in today's series, the U.S. Army appears here 
showing off a portable shower unit in North Africa.  From the LIFE Archive.

 

5 comments:

  1. I like the way the colour brings out the tan lines. The sunshine helps, too.

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    1. True, and it's quite good overall in a technical sense, especially given the limitations of color photography at the time.

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  2. Un mot, MAGNIFIQUE !
    ***********
    One word, MAGNIFICENT!

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  3. I have noticed over the years that LIFE had a very cavalier attitude to male nudity, with locker room scenes, jockstraps, naked swimming and naked soldiers. Everything, in fact, but the membrum virile. I remember an American boy at my school once calling National Geographic "the only legal stroke book in the library". Were both publications from the same stable?

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    1. No, they were published by two very separate organizations. LIFE was founded in 1883 as a bland general interest weekly, but became a hallmark of photojournalism after it was bought out by Henry Luce of Time, Inc. in 1936. The only thing Time retained from the original was the name. The nudity actually shown in LIFE was in line with the restrained standards of the time, and I'm not aware of any censorship issues. The LIFE archive, however, retained all the unedited fully nude photos that the photographers shot. We vintage bloggers of nude men will be eternally grateful for that. The story goes that the subjects of these full-on frontal nudes were told that their privates would be cropped out. This was true as far as the immediate publication was concerned, but no one knew that the unedited originals would be on the internet 75 years later.

      National Geographic was and is the media outlet for the National Geographic Society of the USA, a group that goes back to the 19th Century. They actually sponsored a lot of expeditions and published some remarkable maps. National Geographic's nudity was acceptable because first, the photos were considered to be academic and not prurient. And second, they were generally of obscure, dark-skinned ethnic groups from far away. I've always wondered what would have happened is they had discovered a remote tribe of all naked white people somewhere.

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