It is possible to have a different view to the war fields and tell micro stories based on gadget. This is the first of such articles. Personal Cameras.
Mavi Boncuk |
Kodak Vest Pocket Camera goes to War
The introduction of the Autographic VPK coincided with a boom in camera sales linked with the outbreak of the First World War. Made between 1912 and 1926 they were small, reliable and simple in design. One of the worlds best-selling cameras of all time they are now much admired and still inexpensively collectable. Many soldiers bought cameras to record their travels and experiences. The VPK was by far the most popular choice, particularly with American ‘doughboys’. It was widely advertised as ‘The Soldier’s Kodak’ and owners were encouraged to ‘Make your own picture record of the War’.
First World War (1914 - 1918).
It was forbidden to take cameras to the front line. Many soldiers disobeyed this order however and took their easily concealed VPK cameras into the trenches with them. Knowing this, during the war years the VPK was advertised by Kodak as 'The Soldiers Camera'.![]()
Heroic "Official" war pictures were designed to keep up morale, soldiers cameras could tell a different story.
Vest Pocket Autographic Kodak camera, c. 1914 © Science Museum Group collection
Vest Pocket Autographic Kodak camera, c. 1914 © Science Museum Group collection
The Vest Pocket Kodak cameras were a best-selling folding camera series made by Eastman Kodak (Rochester), from 1912 to 1935. They were the first cameras to use the smaller 127 film reels. "Hawk-Eye" versions of the Vest Pocket Kodaks were premium models, and the "Special" models had more sophisticated lens/shutter combinations. A special Vest Pocket wooden development tank for the typIe 127 rollfilm was available from Kodak, as well as a special Vest Pocket enlarging camera.
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Vest Pocket Kodak (1912-1914)
This is the original model and doesn't have the Autographic feature which was added to create the later models. It had to be loaded through the top, inserting both film spools at once with the film stretched between them. It had the small three-blade variant of Kodak's Ball Bearing Shutter No.0. Folded it was really handsome, not bigger than many modern compact cameras. Hidden behind its lens board was its brilliant finder. A strut folding variant had a f/6.8 72mm achromatic meniscus lens, hidden behind a mask that allowed a maximum aperture of f/11. The British version exclusively got a true f/6.8 lens from Italian optics maker Koristka.
The Autographic VPK
From 1915 to the end of production in 1926 all VPK's had an 'autographic' facility. After an exposure a 'trap door' on the back of the camera was opened to reveal part of the film's backing paper. Thus exposed, a one-line message could be written here to occupy the space on the negative between the pictures. Pressure from a supplied metal stylus on the exposed backing paper in daylight would imprint the message onto the film. After winding-on the film, the autographic procedure could be repeated after each exposure. Whereas 127 film was used up to 1915, Autographic A-127 film was needed after 1915 to enable this facility. Film was side-loaded into the camera by unlocking a side plate before inserting the film and connecting it to a waiting take-up spool.
Also from 1915, as well as usual black-painted VPK Special cameras, Japan Crystal (crackle) finish and most costly of all, Morocco leather camera coverings were also available.
Although the outer dimensions of the camera remained the same, over the years it got heavier. The original VPK weighed 250 gm, while a typical VPK Autographic Special of 1926 weighed 300 gm.
Vest Pocket Autographic Kodak (1915-1926)
The Vest Pocket Autographic Kodak was the version advertised in the U.S.A. as the "Soldier's camera" during World War I. It was very successful, selling 1,750,000 units. It was of the compact strut folding type and had the meniscus lens or a U.S.-speed 8 Rapid Rectilinear lens.
The camera back had an area through which notes could be written onto the paper backing of the 127 film, the "autographic" feature - invented by Henry J. Gaisman.
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Kodak camera used in World War 1 by Wilfrid Selwyn Kent Hughes | https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog/10320
VEST POCKET KODAK
Back when EXIF data was DIY, this easily-concealed camera was a runaway success with World War I servicemen. | Rebekah White
Vest Pocket Kodak![]()
IT WAS JUST one inch thick, comparable to today’s compact cameras, and its aluminium alloy body meant it was unusually cheap on its release in 1912.
The Vest Pocket Kodak was true to its name, “small enough to be carried in a waistcoat pocket without inconvenience,” noted an early review in The Amateur Photographer.
Opening the front of the camera revealed a folding bellows stabilised by trellis-shaped struts, and a short stand allowing the camera to rest vertically. Hidden behind the lens plate was a small brilliant finder, where the photographer could compose a tiny, upside-down image. It had a 75-millimetre meniscus lens with a minimum focal length of around two metres, and two shutter speeds, 1/25 and 1/50.
The first camera to use 127 film, its negatives were about the size of postage stamps. The whole thing weighed just over 300 grams.
“The biggest photographic advance in 20 years,” claimed a 1915 advertisement for Kodak Autographic film. “Any negative worth the making is worth a date and title…
When World War I broke out, the camera was widely marketed as ‘The Soldier’s Kodak’, with advertisements encouraging new recruits to “Make your own picture record of the war.”
Cameras were forbidden among the British and Commonwealth armed forces, but that didn’t stop many servicemen taking them to the front lines, and the Vest Pocket Kodak was the most popular choice. About 5500 VPKs were sold in Britain in 1914—a figure that more than quintupled to 28,000 the following year.
In 1915, Kodak brought a unique innovation to the camera with the introduction of ‘autographic’ film. Patented by American inventor Henry Jacques Gaisman (also responsible for the safety razor) and acquired by George Eastman for US $300,000, autographic film had tissue-thin carbon paper between the film and its paper backing. This allowed photographers to write a short caption on the negative between exposures, so Vest Pocket models were adapted to incorporate a small hinged door in the back of the camera, and an iron stylus that clipped to the body.
“The biggest photographic advance in 20 years,” claimed a 1915 advertisement for Kodak Autographic film. “Any negative worth the making is worth a date and title… “The occasion or place, interesting facts about the children, the stop, exposure and date, a friend’s autograph under his portrait—that’s the sort of thing that makes the autographic record so valuable for the future.”
Nearly two million Vest Pocket Kodaks were sold between 1912 and 1926—and much of the surviving photographic record of World War I from Western soldiers’ point of view is thanks to the Vest Pocket Kodak—but autographic film never became as popular as George Eastman hoped, and was discontinued in 1932.
In his new book, author and military historian Jon Cooksey looks back at the one camera that was able to democratise photography for the troops of the First World War – the Vest Pocket Kodak
It was not just their ‘troubles’ that many of the men – and women – who marched away between 1914 and 1918 packed into their ‘old kit bags’. Along with their absolute military essentials, they slipped another, unofficial, item into their pack or tunic pocket: the new, exciting, compact Vest Pocket Kodak camera – the VPK.
Transported to battlefields around the world, these cherished VPKs were the tools by which the ordinary soldier or nurse would capture the significant events of what would be the single greatest adventure of their lives – in real time. No other army in history had been able to record its war in detail but the men and women of 1914-1918 had the technology; they had their trusty VPKs – blatantly advertised as the ‘Soldier’s Kodak’ – and they were determined not to miss a minute.
The Vest Pocket Kodak
Battlefield photography was not a new phenomenon. The first war photograph had depicted a scene from the American–Mexican War of 1846, and the photographs taken by Roger Fenton in the Crimea and Mathew Brady’s team during the American Civil War broadcast the gruesome realities of conflict to a wider audience – albeit often staged.
But such technology was cumbersome. Roger Fenton and Mathew Brady had used wet-plate technology with its associated large, unwieldy cameras that needed long exposure times. However, Kodak launched its new medium for the masses in 1912, just two years before the outbreak of the First World War. The response was astonishing. Thousands invested in the new VPK technology – smaller, lighter, portable cameras using celluloid film, which produced images of a consistent quality – and were bitten by the photography bug. A craze was born. Now, ordinary people did not have to rely on professional studios or offcial photographers as a means of recording their lives and the lives of those around them. They could do it for themselves. And so they did, in their thousands, with many soldiers among them.
Packing their VPKs, they marched off to war. They had no idea where they were going or what fate awaited them, but they would document their days and snap their deeds along the way.
Senior officers mixing with other ranks in 1915. This picture was taken several weeks after the British Army had banned the use of cameras
Always ready for action
Kodak had introduced its ‘new Vest Pocket Kodak’ to the world in its catalog of 1912. ‘This wonderfully compact little camera… is always ready for action.’ It was six years since it had ceased production of the No. 0 Folding Pocket Kodak, but the concept of its compact, built-in roll film mechanism and pull-out, strut-supported lens board were redesigned and re-engineered to fit into a lightweight, all-aluminium body, while its 15⁄8 x 21⁄2in negative format film was reconfigured into a smaller cartridge to create what would become known as the eight-exposure 127 film in 1913. The result was a smaller, more compact and lighter camera. Measuring just 1 x 23⁄8 x 43⁄4 in and weighing in at nine ounces, it was not much bigger than today’s iPhone and was instantly recognizable by its organic, curved design, shiny, black enamel finish, nickel-plated struts and black leather bellows when extended. Now, amateur photographers at the start of a the 20th century had a window through which they could capture and document their new-fangled, rapidly changing, brave new world for $6 – half the average weekly wage in the United States – or 30 shillings in Britain, with rolls of film at just 20 cents apiece. The VPK – an icon of form, function and visual democracy – was born. It was an immediate hit with amateur photographers in the US and abroad who were looking for compact, portable and easy-to-operate cameras that represented excellent value for money. The VPK revolutionised the possibilities and scope of amateur photographers worldwide and contributed to what became almost a craze in Europe in the two years prior to the outbreak of the First World War. By 1914, yearly sales of the VPK in Britain reached 5,500.
Great adventure
When war broke out in August 1914, hundreds of British soldiers took their VPKs to France in what many expected to be a short but glorious war of adventure. Their hope was to capture on film, for posterity, their part in what they sensed would be the greatest test of their lives, just as they had snapped their escapades on holiday in peacetime. Understandably, given such an existential crisis, the popularity of the amateur photography craze amongst the soldiery was not a high priority at the War Office, and the wisdom of soldiers taking their own cameras to the front was never questioned. With no-one checking on the numbers of cameras carried – more often than not by officers – or the content of any photographs taken, the men of the British Expeditionary Force began snapping away immediately, charting every twist and turn of the embarkation, the channel crossing, the march to the front and eventually the fighting. Many officers, some of them holding very senior positions in regular British infantry battalions with long and illustrious records, documented the early months of the war in great detail – from the first engagements at Mons and Le Cateau in August 1914, throughout the Great Retreat, the battles of the Marne and the Aisne in September and the onset of trench warfare during the winter of 1914-1915.
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Men of the 1st Battalion East Lancashire Regiment take cover on a hillside south of Solesmes, France on 25 August 1914. Photograph taken by battalion second-in-command Major Thomas Stanton Lambert
Action shot
The first uncensored ‘action’ shot of the war – the transport column of the 1st Battalion the Middlesex Regiment under shell re on the high ground south of the River Marne, complete with wounded and bleeding officer – appeared in the new wartime weekly The War Illustrated on 21 November 1914. Fearing the potential intelligence and propaganda value should soldiers’ photographs fall into the wrong hands, the British Army issued a General Routine Order (GRO) before Christmas 1914: ‘The taking of photographs is not permitted… Any officers or soldier… found in possession of a camera will be placed in arrest, and the case reported to the General Headquarters.’
Images of British soldiers openly ‘fraternising with Fritz’ in no man’s land at Christmas 1914 rocked the authorities when they appeared in the press in January 1915. A catch-all War Office Instruction (WOI) was issued in March 1915, banning the possession and use of cameras in all operational theatres. Many officers and men duly sent their cameras home, but some continued to snap away, oblivious to, or in spite of, the warnings and often with the collusion of their superiors. Some continued to use their VPKs throughout 1916 into 1917 and even 1918. Their images – taken by, and of, ‘everyman’ and ‘everywoman’ at war – would forever link the Vest Pocket Kodak to the first ‘Great War for Civilisation’.
The Vest Pocket Kodak & the First World War by Jon Cooksey, is published by Ammonite Press, £7.99, ISBN 978-1781452790.
Jon Cooksey is a military historian who has worked on radio and TV documentaries such as Heroes at War (BBC Radio 5 Live). He is the author of 20 titles, and has written for national magazines and newspapers.
Read more at Amateurphotographer
Gallipoli: Through the Soldier’s Lens
CURATOR’S CHOICE #21: ALISON WISHART FROM AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL
Alison Wishart has worked as a curator and/or collection manager since 2003 at the Museum of Tropical Queensland in Townsville and the State Library of Queensland (Brisbane) before moving to Canberra in 2008 to work at the National Museum of Australia and now the Australian War Memorial where she holds the position of Senior Curator of Photographs. She has a BA (Hons) from the University of Queensland and a Masters in Museum Studies and Cultural Heritage. Alison is currently researching the psychological, social and physical impacts of food at Gallipoli and online memorialisation.
To mark the 100 years since Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) fought the Gallipoli campaign of WW1, Alison Wishart, Senior Curator of Photographs at Australian War Memorial, explores the remarkable photographic record left by the soldiers. Made possible by the birth of Kodak’s portable camera, the photographs give a rare and intimate portrait of the soldier’s day-to-day life away from the heat of battle.
2015 marks the centenary of one of the most commemorated events in Australia’s military history. One hundred years ago, at dawn of 25th April, boatloads of Australians and New Zealanders quietly landed on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula at a beach that became known as Anzac Cove.
Had Australia’s military commanders and elected leaders known how significant this event was to become in Australia’s history and the development of its national identity, they might have thought to send official photographers or war artists. But they didn’t. Instead, the photographic record of the nine month Gallipoli campaign relies primarily on the images taken by soldiers.
Fortunately, Kodak had released its ‘Vest Pocket’ camera in 1912, which made taking a camera to the front more feasible. Kodak encouraged enlistees to do this, marketing their new model as ‘the soldier’s Kodak’. Below is pictured the camera used by Sergeant P E Virgoe at Gallipoli from May-October 1915.
Officially, soldiers were not allowed to take a camera to the front. This was stipulated by Britain’s Secretary of State for the War, Lord Kitchener, after the bloody allied defeats of 1914 made it clear that manipulation of the public record of the war would be necessary to maintain enthusiasm for it. However, while the ruling was strictly enforced on the Western Front, it was barely given a cursory nod at Gallipoli. This allowed amateur and semi-professional photographer-soldiers to practice their focusing and framing skills in between their duties.
Approximately half of the Australians who fought at Gallipoli – nearly 25,000 recruits – left for their great overseas ‘adventure’ with a compact camera in their kit. Many of the nurses tending the wounded on the nearby Greek Island of Lemnos also carried a camera.
Informal portrait of Sister Emily Cornelia (Corrie) Parish, of 2nd Australian General Hospital, holding a camera (ca. 1915) / P05382.018 – Source.Little did they know that by creating their own visual diary, they would also be contributing to Australia’s only photographic record of the Dardanelles campaign. Of the 6,332 Gallipoli images from 1915 in the Australian War Memorial’s collection, soldiers took about 60 per cent. After the war, soldiers or their families donated their photographs to the Memorial, often in the form of personal albums or loose prints.
As ‘soldier photographers’, when they opened the shutter, they had a completely different purpose in mind from creating an official record of the war. This gives their photographs a raw, unmediated honesty.
Landing stores at Watson’s Pier, Gallipoli, Turkey (1915) The men documented their daily life which was often boring and monotonous. In between battles, there were long stretches of ‘fatigues’ such as digging trenches and dugouts, carrying water up from the beaches or wells and going on sentry duty. As soldiers, they were not in a position to photograph their fighting, so they took snaps of their daily life instead. What the photographs lack in composition, they make up for in their poignant and candid simplicity.
A soldier carrying water in two kerosene tins (1915) Army cooks outside the dugout which serves as the cookhouse for the headquarters of the 4th Light Horse Regiment, 1st AIF (1915)
The photographs complement the soldiers’ written records. Sapper Victor Willey, a 22 year old from Victoria (service no. 134) wrote about his awful rations in a letter to his parents dated 7 September 1915:
We are fed up with this life, and the strain upon our constitution is terrible. In fact, some of us who have been in the trenches since 25th April and are now as weak as cats and no wonder! [. . .] in the morning we get a piece of bacon about six inches long [. . .] (but it is nearly all fat) and about a pint of tea with hard biscuits. On rare occasions we also get a loaf of bread. For dinner [lunch], we have three courses – water, tea and sugar (lovely). For tea, we have bully-beef stew (done to perfection). This happens every day, barring the bread – but at times the bread is forgotten altogether.
The Memorial does not hold any photographs taken by Willey but it does hold many photographs of the food he speaks of.
The 1st Australian Field Bakery established on ‘K’ Beach, Imbros / C04618 – Source.
Officers of D Company, 10th Battalion eating a meal in their dugout mess. Left to right: Lieutenant (Lt) William Howard Perry, MC; Lt William Stanley Frayne (killed in action 6 August 1915); Lt John de Courey Harrison; Captain Felix Gordon Giles, DSO, Officer Commanding; Lt David Leslie Todd (1915) / A00715 – Source.
Officers of D Company, 10th Battalion eating a meal in their dugout mess. Left to right: Lieutenant (Lt) William Howard Perry, MC; Lt William Stanley Frayne (killed in action 6 August 1915); Lt John de Courey Harrison; Captain Felix Gordon Giles, DSO, Officer Commanding; Lt David Leslie Todd (1915) / A00715 – Source.
Staff Sergeant Hector Dinning of the Australian Army Service Corps wrote in his 1918 memoir:
It’s the monotony that kills; not hard work, nor hard fare. We have now been disembarked on the Peninsula rather longer than three months. But there has been little change in our way of living. Every day there is the same work on the same beach, shelled by the same guns, manned by the same Turks…
Colonel Charles Snodgrass Ryan, a surgeon with the Australian Army Medical Services, took a remarkable collection of over 180 photographs at Gallipoli and Egypt in 1915. His images, taken with a stereo camera, also depict daily life at Gallipoli, but are composed with a practised eye.
Two soldiers of the Supply Depot, 1st Australian Division, standing on the beach amongst stacked boxes of corned beef (canned meat), 1915 
Officers and soldiers conferring in a trench reinforced with sandbags on one of the ridges at Gallipoli (1915) Corporal Albert Savage was stationed in the x-ray ‘department’ of the 3rd Australian General Hospital on Lemnos Island, 96km from Anzac Cove and the destination for casualties evacuated from Gallipoli. The Memorial holds over 300 photographs taken by him on Lemnos which provide a valuable insight into the workings of a field hospital on an arid island.
Dawn at Lemnos (1915)
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Evacuation of patients from No. 3 Australian General Hospital (3AGH) by ambulance to the wharf for ship transport to Egypt (1916)
Evacuation of patients from No. 3 Australian General Hospital (3AGH) by ambulance to the wharf for ship transport to Egypt (1916)
Padre Walter Dexter also had a camera at Gallipoli. As an Australian army chaplain who officiated at burial services he had to come to terms with death, and some of his photographs depict this. He also photographed soldiers at the latrines. These sort of candid images would never be within the remit of official photographers.
Four unidentified men using a latrine high above the beach at Anzac Cove (1915) 
Bodies of dead soldiers lying in a row in a trench, having been covered with blankets or other items as shrouds (1915)
War correspondents Phillip Schuler and Charles Bean travelled with their cameras as well as their typewriters. Before embarking for Gallipoli, they photographed each other on the same pyramid in Egypt.Left: Captain C E W Bean on top of the Pyramid of Cheops (1915)
The Memorial holds more than 2000 of Schuler’s evocative photographs from Gallipoli and the western front (where he was killed in June 1917) including a much reproduced image after the battle of Lone Pine.
A trench at Lone Pine after the battle, showing Australian and Turkish dead on the parapet (1915) / A02025 – Source.
Black & white - Glass original half plate negative | Schuler, Phillip Frederick Edward
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Black & white - Glass original half plate negative | Schuler, Phillip Frederick Edward
(Glass Plate Photographs)
Charles Bean, Australia’s only official war correspondent at Gallipoli, felt that photographs should tell the “plain, simple truth”. He disagreed vehemently with the practice of Ernest Brooks, who staged photographs for dramatic effect, such as the photograph seen below. Brooks was appointed by the British Admiralty to photograph British and Australian troops at Gallipoli.
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Charles Bean, Australia’s only official war correspondent at Gallipoli, felt that photographs should tell the “plain, simple truth”. He disagreed vehemently with the practice of Ernest Brooks, who staged photographs for dramatic effect, such as the photograph seen below. Brooks was appointed by the British Admiralty to photograph British and Australian troops at Gallipoli.
A staged photograph: The original Admiralty caption to this photograph reads: “An Australian bringing in a wounded comrade to hospital. Notwithstanding the unhappy situation, they joked as they made their way down from the front.” (1915)
Charles Bean went on to help establish the Australian War Records Section in 1917 and write the Official History of the Australian Imperial Forces in the First World War. His photographs, such as that of an outdoor communion service, helped him recall the events of the Great War.
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An open-air communion service at Anzac (1915)
For the 25,000+ Australian soldiers who took cameras to Gallipoli, their photographs also served as memory triggers. When they returned from the war, the images reminded them that amidst the monotony of trench life – the flies, heat, dust, stench and thirst of the summer stalemate – they found people and events worth photographing. A century on, we are grateful to these soldier photographers for giving us a glimpse into their life at Gallipoli. Devoid of hubris, but often full of humour and pathos, these photographs provide a unique record of life at the front line. As Australians and New Zealanders around the world gather at dawn this Anzac Day, I hope we will remember not just the soldiers who landed on the beaches, but also the remarkable photographic record they created.
Sickness and disease was one of the greatest problems on Gallipoli for the troops of all nations. On Anzac men had only to turn their gaze from the Turkish trenches towards the sea where they would have seen the endless traffic of small boats and barges out to the hospital ships offshore.
Only twice during the whole campaign did the proportion of men being evacuated from Anzac with wounds – during May and the two weeks of the August offensive – exceed the proportion being taken off with some form of illness. In some ways this was the main personal experience of serving on Gallipoli, rather than the more dramatic but short-lived periods of battle. The youngest Australian to die on Gallipoli – Private James Martin, aged 14 – did so from illness not wounds.
The image on this panel shows two stretcher-bearers. Undoubtedly, the most famous medic on Anzac was the ‘man with the donkey’, Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick, 3rd Field Ambulance. However, it was decided not to feature Simpson, whose story is so well known, but rather that unsung legion of other bearers whose work right throughout the campaign undoubtedly saved many lives.
Stretcher bearers carrying wounded at Anzac. The soldier on the left is carrying filled water bottles up to the front line. (Australian War Memorial C01761)
They lived with death, dined with disease | From an anonymous poem about Gallipoli
When the Gallipoli campaign began no-one expected that it would last so long or cause so many casualties. The number of wounded from the initial invasion overwhelmed the poorly organised medical facilities. During major attacks many hours passed before a wounded man received adequate care. Eventually, proper lines of evacuation were established to hospital ships and back to base hospitals at Lemnos island, Egypt and Malta.
As the summer heat intensified, conditions on Gallipoli deteriorated. Primitive sanitation led to a plague of flies and the outbreak of disease. Thousands of men were evacuated suffering from dysentery, diarrhoea and enteric fever. The poor and monotonous diet of bully beef, hard biscuits, jam and tea made the situation worse. Men suffered particularly from lice in their clothing. Morale sank as the prospect of victory receded. Many came to feel they would never leave Gallipoli alive.
VEST POCKET KODAK & THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Pub date: May 2017ISBN-13: 9781781452790
Author: Jon Cooksey, foreword by Richard van Emden
Price: £7.99
Binding: HB
No. of pages: 96
Photos: Includes 50 photographs
Dimensions: 178 x 110mm
Colour : B/w throughout
The Vest Pocket Kodak & The First World War is the first in a proposed series of books documenting the relationship between conflicts and the iconic cameras that were used to record them. Launched in April 1912, the Vest Pocket Kodak was one of the world’s first compact cameras. About the size of an iPhone, it was small enough to fit in the pocket of a military waistcoat (the American ‘vest’). The VPK was advertised as the ‘Soldier’s Kodak’ and the pictures the troops took with the camera offer us a remarkably personal viewpoint on the First World War.
The first half of the book looks at how the Vest Pocket Kodak was developed and advertised, and tells the story of its significance in creating a unique account of the Great War. The second part presents a commemorative album of images taken with the camera: a remarkable record of a lost generation, and a tragic reflection of the manufacturer’s advertising by-line: ‘Kodak pictures never let you forget.’
Jon Cooksey is a leading military historian, editor of Stand To! magazine and author of over 20 titles. His work has appeared in military magazines and national newspapers, and on television and radio.