THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, May 22, 1996 TAG: 9605220050
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Gateway
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW DOBIAS, SPECIAL TO THE DAILY BREAK
LENGTH: 93 lines
AS THE BLACK AND WHITE photo begins forming on the computer screen, the image of a party takes shape.
The young men and women in attendance, dressed in full uniform, pack the frame. Standing in the middle of the crowd, staring downward with his hand wrapped around a bottle of beer, his grip broken where a cigarette parts his fingers, is U.S. Army Pfc. Woodrow Arnold Powers.
At the moment the camera finds him, he seems quiet, as if reflecting about shipping out from Hampton Roads for the war in Europe the next day.
This picture, one of more than 3,500 now available on the Internet, comes from the Library of Virginia's U.S. Army Signal Corps Photograph Collection. The photos capture Hampton Roads at wartime, from 1942 to 1946, a time period when 1.7 million troops zipped through. Then, the Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation was one of the nation's busiest ports.
The Army sent Signal Corps photographers to document arrivals and departures: Soldiers were photographed saying good-byes and hugging hellos. The wounded were met at the docks as they were being transported to Army hospitals. German and
Asian prisoners of war who did manual labor at the port were also photographed.
The collection is packed with scenes of life, work and people: WACs picnicking at the Newport News Mariners' Museum, the building of ships, Red Cross volunteers and a Norfolk boxing team.
Detailed captions accompany the photographs. Browsers can search using surname, ship name or hometown. A search under the ship name West Point, for example, would bring up a list of mentions in the database. From there, the user can choose and download digitized images of the ship.
To convert the collection to digital images, Pierre Courtois, library photographer for the project, worked for three weeks, including nights and weekends. He reshot the originals and then scanned them from slides onto the computer network.
Loretta Haack, a computer analyst at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville who has used the site, says the project is a good way to preserve history.
``It is truly a comfort,'' Haack said, ``to see some of the country's most precious artifacts being so graciously and generously tendered.''
AS THE BLACK AND WHITE photo begins forming on the computer screen, the image of a party takes shape.
The young men and women in attendance, dressed in full uniform, pack the frame. Standing in the middle of the crowd, staring downward with his hand wrapped around a bottle of beer, his grip broken where a cigarette parts his fingers, is U.S. Army Pfc. Woodrow Arnold Powers.
At the moment the camera finds him, he seems quiet, as if reflecting about shipping out from Hampton Roads for the war in Europe the next day.
This picture, one of more than 3,500 now available on the Internet, comes from the Library of Virginia's U.S. Army Signal Corps Photograph Collection. The photos capture Hampton Roads at wartime, from 1942 to 1946, a time period when 1.7 million troops zipped through. Then, the Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation was one of the nation's busiest ports.
The Army sent Signal Corps photographers to document arrivals and departures: Soldiers were photographed saying good-byes and hugging hellos. The wounded were met at the docks as they were being transported to Army hospitals. German and Italian prisoners of war who did manual labor at the port were also photographed.
The collection is packed with scenes of life, work and people: WACs picnicking at the Newport News Mariners' Museum, the building of ships, Red Cross volunteers and a Norfolk boxing team.
Detailed captions accompany the photographs. Browsers can search using surname, ship name or hometown. A search under the ship name West Point, for example, would bring up a list of mentions in the database. From there, the user can choose and download digitized images of the ship.
To convert the collection to digital images, Pierre Courtois, library photographer for the project, worked for three weeks, including nights and weekends. He reshot the originals and then scanned them from slides onto the computer network.
Loretta Haack, a computer analyst at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville who has used the site, says the project is a good way to preserve history.
``It is truly a comfort,'' Haack said, ``to see some of the country's most precious artifacts being so graciously and generously tendered.'' ILLUSTRATION: B\W photo from Library of Virginia by CNB