Do you wonder what I am doing? I come in to the lab. at about 8:30 and get going on pictures. Just at present we are making up divisional sets – thirty pictures on the action of each division, including one or two of General Pershing. I think I mentioned them in a previous letter. I go into the files and pick out the best ones. When they are gotten together I cull them over and pick out the best ones. When they are gotten together I cull them over several times until I am down to the required number then I must have the titles; that means more digging in other files. Then the captions must be written, one for each picture. The whole job takes about two and a half days. The work is divided between Lt. Cushing and myself. He does most of the writing and I do most of the searching. We do the selecting together. I know the files of this lab. better than anyone else in the place with one exception, so it is entirely practical for me to delve in them.
Once upon a time I used to pride myself on being able to remember telephone numbers and such things, but wondered how that could ever be of any use. Now it stands me in good stead. I have a remarkable memory for numbers and facts about these forty thousand still photographs. It is too good. I’m afraid they’ll want it to stay here. We get requests of all kinds every day for pictures. I saw one today from a cook in some infantry company. It said: “Information wanted about picture taken of our kitchen about Sept. 27th.” The one exception mentioned above is the man whose job it is to handle such requests. He knows more than I do, but he gets stuck lots of times, and asks me a dozen things a day. Can you imagine looking through incomplete indexes and files for forty thousand pictures to find one of an infantry company’s kitchen? We probably have no fewer than three hundred like it scattered through the files. The only way out is a couple of good memories. Harry Anderson has one and I have the other. They are the only ones in the place.
A request like the above is handled about this way. From the number of the man’s regiment I figure out what division he is in and then try to remember who was our photographer with that division on September 27th. Then get the file numbers of all his stuff about that date, go look at them all, and make double sure by looking up the official title of the one we think is right. It takes someone who can put his hand on all the necessary cards and books and pictures. I should say that fully half my time is devoted to information work of this kind separate from the news department.
The worst of it is that we have to fill these requests or bother with them at all. Linemen or lieutenants, cooks or colonels – anybody in France can have pictures if he’ll only say they’re wanted for official purposes. What he does with them after they’re out of this lab, nobody knows.
Next post April 3.
Letters from Sidney Friend During The Great War 