A New Project

I am taking on a new challenge — doing a website for a  friend. She has inherited terrific photos/albums from he father and wants them on the web for everyone to see.

Marvin Popkin was a fantastic amateur photographer, who chronicled his way across Europe as a soldier in WWII, and filled four albums with original photos.

The first album is strictly his own. It is currently being scanned professionally onto a DVD in pdf. The book was too large a format (11×17) for my scanner.

The second book, called “Four Soldiers” was collected from his own photos and those of three other soldiers – two fellow US soldiers who joined him at Leisure World in retirement, and a fourth soldier who was a deceased German Ph. D. infantryman whose letters, photos, etc were found in his father’s smashed and burned home in Austria.

That book, shows the European war through four soldier’s eyes.  Real life photos of the massive and individual destruction of war, and man’s inhumanity to fellow man is visible in terms that only photographs can convey.  The piles of human corpses in concentration camps, and the subsequent much smaller piles of corpses of SS Troop Guards killed by the concentration camp inmates upon their liberation tell a story that must never be forgotten.

The next two books, I have not yet seen.

Additionally, Marvin took THOUSANDS of photos as he traveled the world after the war, concentrating primarily on backward and aboriginal lands like New Guinea in the ’50s, and Africa, where he did some absolutely fantastic character faces.

All of this will get on a website I am currently designing. The website is a paean to those who served  in WWII.

They were indeed, “The Greatest Generation.”