In the early 1930s, a woman claiming to be the widow of
a Royal Flying Corps pilot produced these photographs of scenes of
aerial combat during World War I. Her late husband, she claimed, had defied the
RFC’s regulations and mounted a camera on his plane, tying its shutter action
to his machine gun. The resulting series of images was the only available
up-close visual representation of British and German planes firing upon each
other, aircraft catching on fire, and pilots falling from the sky.
During WWI, camera technology simply hadn’t progressed to a
point where it was possible to take an accurate photograph of dogfighting.
Meanwhile, the public was rabidly curious about the new kind of warfare. The
appearance of “Mrs. Gladys Maud Cockburne-Lange” and her trove of photographs
neatly bridged this gap ...
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