Wednesday, July 16, 2008

WW2 Portraits at Ventrilville


I posted some found photographs at Ventrilville that I think some of you might find... inspiring. These are not for the faint of heart. I'm planning on doing a series of digital portraits sort of like these sometime down the road. Check it out.

9 comments:

Jeffrey Meyer said...

Wait, Aeron -- these are actual, unretouched photos? Or a project of yours? I'm assuming this is combat injuries, primitive skin grafts, etc. Where did these come from?

Human Mollusk said...

Wow. Kind of proves that no fiction can ever come close to the real horrors of war. I recently visited the medical museum here in Berlin were you could see documentation of the techniques they used to stitch up these poor bastards. Also, there's a famous anti-war book from 1924 called "Krieg dem Kriege" with lots of similar photographs which you might want to check out:
http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/waw.htm
Finally I was reminded of this one:
http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/11_01/YaroshBushG_468x340.jpg

Anonymous said...

Untouched photos, Jeffrey. These are a small portion, I think I posted 24 out of around 80? from a collection of these WW2 facial reconstruction photos posted in a thread at http://www.ogrishforum.com/ I'm one of the ghouls regularly checking out the video and image section on there. Ogrish used to have their image and video section as one regular website but liveleak bought them out and stopped posting the really gory stuff soo the juicy stuff has moved into the messageboards from the original site.

And it appears that the images were taken from a membership only site called http://www.thanatos.net/

Interesting links, Fufu. I found a page with some scans taken from the book you mentioned here - http://www.greatwardifferent.com/Great_War/Kriege/Kriege_00.htm

I've had plans to do a series of black and white fantasy portraits inspired largely by Francis Bacon. But these war photos are as close to the real thing so far as a Francis Bacon style of human being as I think I'll see so those will be very helpful in giving me a good idea what real physical abstraction of the human face could and would look like.


- Aeron

Paleo said...

Poor guys.

Paleo said...

Your idea for a series of fantastical portraits intersecting Bacon and these real horrors its too damn brilliant, can't wait.

Matthew Allison said...

Aeron, or anyone else who would know - what is the purpose of the tube-shaped pieces of flesh that many of these men have on their faces and necks?

Aeron said...

I don't know but it seems that they needed to keep larger amounts of flesh in certain areas than needed to either make sure it would survive and then cut off bits of that to add on to different parts of the face later. And or they needed that section to be directly connected to a certain vein in the body?

Matthew Allison said...

Wow.

When my dad was a little boy, maybe 1 or 2, he went thru a car windshield and they had to graft a piece of his leg onto his forehead. I used to call him Leg-Head.

I was a rotten kid.

Unknown said...

The flesh tubes are called pedicle tubes and they are made by cutting a flap of the patients healthy skin with one end still attached to rest of the body of the skin. the sides of the flaps are stitched to form this tube and the free end of this tube is stitched to the area that needs new skin. The idea is to have a supply of more sterile blood and skin cells from a healthy source which allows for better acceptance of skin graft. when the new skin has grown sufficient over the needed area, the pedicle tubes are simply cut away and the flap stitched back into its original place.