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An official war artist for the Royal Army Medical Corps, Lobley portrays individual faces, some of them visibly scarred. Philadelphia-born Anna Coleman Ladd is best known for her neoclassical portrait busts and bronze sculptures of sprites frolicking in public fountains.
Her publications, focusing on ideas of the body and the self, include ‘Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages’ and ‘Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement’. In fact, Sidcup, England, home to a soldiers’ hospital, painted its public benches blue to warn townspeople that any man sitting on one would be distressing to view.
Ladd recollected that the men, who often arrived with flowers, would stay on for a game of dominoes or checkers: “The blind ones played dominoes and the others checkers. At 26 she married a physician from Boston, where she continued her work, specializing in public art and portrait busts.
Wood’s department was for those patients whose faces remained so irreparably disfigured despite facial surgery they were deemed unsuitable for routine pre- and post-op photographs. One of them takes the cigarette from his mouth, reaches behind his ear and, with a smile, removes his chin. Arguing that imperfection is a foundational modern idea, the book will suggest new ways of thinking about the cultural preference for flawless perfection. As Official Photographer of Great Britain during World War I, Horace Nicholls was commissioned to make a record of the war at home: the great munitions factories and shipyards, training camps, new recruits and soldiers on leave.Each plate was effectively a part-portrait of the sitter, meticulously brought to the verge of life. His compatriots seem just as comfortable in the company of Ladd’s assistants, nodding and chatting while the sculptors make adjustments.
Facial injury was rarely depicted in the illustrated press and almost never in official war art or propaganda. Over the course of two years, Ladd’s studio produced 185 masks — a number that pales compared to World War I’s estimated 20,000 facial casualties. There was a regular Tuesday tea, and at any one time there might be half a dozen visitors: the men we see in the photographs and film, but also surgeons and curious members of the public. Paré’s writings contain illustrations of enamelled eyes, prosthetic ears and noses, palatal obturators (which covered an opening in the roof of the mouth), mechanical limbs and an artificial penis crafted from wood or tin. In late 1917, Anna Coleman Ladd met Francis Derwent Wood, a British sculptor and founder of the 3rd London General Hospital’s Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department.One wall of Ladd’s studio was decorated with rows of plaster casts; finished plates were arranged on a makeshift tablecloth with a vase of lilies. First used on the battlefields of WWI, machine guns, with their rapid fire and long range, were positively deadly, killing or wounding roughly 60,000 British soldiers at the Battle of the Somme in just one day.
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