Howard R. Hollem - Colour Photographs.

Howard R. Hollem (1902–1949) was an American photographer whose principal surviving colour work was produced for the United States Office of War Information during the Second World War. Working within the FSA and OWI photographic programme, Hollem was among the relatively small number of government photographers assigned to colour photography between 1941 and 1943. His subjects concentrated on the American home front, particularly aircraft production, naval aviation, steel manufacturing, shipbuilding and the wartime workforce. His assignments included Republic Steel in Youngstown, Ohio in 1941, Higgins Industries in New Orleans in 1942, Naval Air Station Corpus Christi in August 1942, Consolidated Aircraft Corporation in Fort Worth in October 1942, industrial production in Milwaukee in 1943 and Colonial Williamsburg in April 1943.

Hollem's Texas assignments contain a substantial part of his surviving colour work. At Naval Air Station Corpus Christi he photographed Navy aircraft, aviation cadets, mechanics and civilian workers, including women employed in aircraft assembly and maintenance. At the Consolidated Aircraft plant in Fort Worth he recorded the production of B 24 Liberator bombers and C 87 transport aircraft, photographing assembly lines, aircraft components, machine operators, mechanics and women working in jobs created by the rapid expansion of wartime manufacturing. His colour photographs show the actual finishes and materials of this industrial environment, including aircraft primers, painted machinery, uniforms, work clothing, tools and factory interiors. The photographs belong to the same government programme that produced the better known wartime colour work of Jack Delano and Alfred T. Palmer.

Hollem's surviving OWI colour photographs were made on Kodachrome colour reversal film. The Library of Congress collection contains approximately 1,600 FSA and OWI colour photographs, including 550 35 mm slides and larger transparencies in approximately 2½ × 2½ inch, 3 × 4 inch and 4 × 5 inch formats. Kodachrome produced a positive transparency rather than a colour negative and required accurate exposure because of its relatively slow sensitivity and restricted exposure latitude compared with contemporary black and white negative film. Hollem therefore frequently worked in strong daylight or carefully illuminated industrial environments, using colour as part of the descriptive record of machinery, aircraft and wartime production. His original transparencies were transferred with the OWI photographic material to the Library of Congress in 1944, and selections of his colour photography were later reproduced in Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939–43 (2004), alongside the colour work of Jack Delano, Alfred T. Palmer, Russell Lee, John Vachon and Marion Post Wolcott.

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Photographs by Howard R. Hollem (1902–1949).
Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information Collection.
Colour photographs produced during the early 1940s.
Licence: No known restrictions on publication.

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