War’s not simply black or white
THE WORLD AFLAME: THE LONG WAR, 1914-1945 ★★★ Dan Jones and Marina Amaral
Head Of Zeus, £25
AS a coffee table book,TheWorld Aflame falls between two stools. It is neither a definitive guide nor a sumptuous artefact.
The book’s conceit is the “colourisation” of 200 original black-and-white photographs from 1914-1945, commencing with the First World War and ending with the Second.
Dan Jones and colourist Marina Amaral previously brought you the wider-ranging The Colour Of Time which was such a success that it could be retitled The Colour Of Money.
It is all here: The Somme? Tick. Great Depression? Tick. Nazi Nuremberg rallies? Tick. Stalingrad? Tick. Yes, the book has a tick-box mentality and, in turning the picture pages, one sometimes yearns for a sidelong squint at the era instead of the full-frontal obvious.
The text which supports the images is competent. Efficient, indeed. I could even just about stomach the worthy claim that the book is offered “as a warning” against the danger of Thirties-type politics making a comeback.
The real dampener on The World Aflame is the picture selection. It is lazy. No stone was turned.
Some images – Christmas truce in the trenches 1914, Eisenhower addressing US parachutists on D-Day’s eve – are wearisomely familiar. Others say nothing at all.
The ethics of colourisation are always debatable.As the authors admit, with tell-tale defensiveness, colourisation is “not an exact science”. Put another way, the colours chosen may be pure guesswork.
And some of the original iconic photographs were composed, as painterly art is composed, in black-and-white and intended to be viewed in black-and-white, such as John Moore’s portrait of stretcher bearers in the mud of Passchendaele. Colourisation can be perilously close to vandalism.
None of this means that colourisation is without merit. It is especially efficacious when fleshing out the human body.To seeWinston Churchill’s youthful freckly face in 1911 is revelatory. In a single image, we see how far the journey was from a somewhat gadabout sea lord to Our National Saviour. Colourisation is useful too when it highlights the red stuff that pumps all flesh: blood.And there was a barrel-load of that in the 31 years between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the bombing of Hiroshima.