Photo Of The Day

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*I have a hundred page photo album with nearly a thousand photos my great-grandfather Walter Koessler took in World War I. It's in pristine condition, beautifully preserved by my family over the last hundred years in Southern California. They've even saved the negatives– untouched, crisp and unfaded –and a box of stereographs from the war and the early 1900s.

This album is a real treasure. Trained as an architect and conscripted into the German Army directly from the classroom, Walter became an officer in the reserve artillery battalion and he took advantage of many unique opportunities to record his experience on film. He captured the haunting experience of building and living in the trenches, the sunlight pouring in through the broken windows of bombed churches, and the clouds through the wings of biplanes as an early aerial reconnaissance photographer. After moving to Los Angeles to work as an art director in films, Walter made this album.*

• Dean Putney
  
  

You can see the blog he made to showcase the images here.