Memories of World War II opens Sunday, February 12, at the Patty & Jay Baker Naples Museum of Art. It contains more than 100 rare and iconic photographs from all theaters of the Second World War, as well as the home front. However, as the core of the Greatest Generation moves through their nineties and the first half of the Silent Generation turns 80, most of the people who view this exhibit will experience these photographs not as memory jogs, but as brand new information.
While the bulk of the photographs were taken by Associated Press photographers, a smattering of the pictures were shot by anonymous Army and Naval photographers. “All of the pictures were transmitted at some time on AP wires, but some probably have not been touched since the war,” said Charles Zoeller, curator of the exhibition and chief of AP’s photo library. Some of the photographers were killed in combat; others went on to postwar prominence.
Several of the images depict the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, but only seem familiar because of movies like Pearl Harbor (2001) and Tora Tora Tora! And AP photographer Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitizer Prize picture of five Marines and a Navy hospital corpsman raising the American flag on 560-foot Mount Suribachi on February 19, 1945 will seem familiar to anyone to traverses the Midpoint Memorial Bridge between Fort Myers and Cape Coral because of the recently-restored Iwo Jima Memorial which stands in Four Mile Cove Ecological Preserve at the foot of the bridge.
There are photographs of American troops hitting Normandy beaches on D-Day and marching through newly liberated Paris; Hitler and Mussolini at the peak of fascist power; Churchill in unmistakable silhouette; and Russian women laying flowers at the feet of four dead GIs who helped liberate them from a slave labor camp. Scores of the 126 photographs have not been seen in decades. Collectively, they tell a story of triumph and tragedy, power and pathos, the leaders and the lost.
The exhibition, which runs through Saturday, April 7, is free for all active and retired members of the Armed Forces and Reserves, who need only show their service ID.
“We are pleased to share this emotionally engaging exhibit with those who have honorably served our country,” said Philharmonic Center CEO Kathleen van Bergen.
The Patty & Jay Baker Naples Museum of Art is open Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. and Sunday, noon -4 p.m. The museum is located at 5833 Pelican Boulevard, Naples. For more information or to order tickets, please call (239) 597-1900 or visit ThePhil.org.
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