Purchased by the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College on August 12, 2020 from Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York.

Unusual Incident of Bombardment of Paris: This photograph has just reached America. It shows a most unusual incident in connection with the bombardment of Paris. A shell from a German gun 72 miles away made this great hole in a Paris street. After the shell exploded, an automobile came along and dropped into the crater.

The Paris Gun – properly called the Kaiser Wilhelm Geschutz – was so named for its sole purpose of shelling Paris from extreme distances, starting in March 1918. On the morning of Saturday, March 23, 1918, a supposed air bomb dropped into a Paris street. When the fragments had cooled enough to be picked up, it was discovered that they were marked with the lands and grooves of rifling---something no bomb ever possesses. Five more bombs crushed down in intervals of around 15 minutes. Twenty-five shells dropped into or near Paris on that March Saturday, killing sixteen and wounding twenty-nine people.

Credited in plate with typeset credit and title on label affixed to verso.

Ferrotyped prints are processed in such a way that they are shiny. The print has a sensitive surface, usually thinner, because it was put through a press while still wet.

Ferrotyped prints have a sensitive surface, usually shiny and thinner, because they are put through a press while still wet. Ferrotyping makes the surface of the photograph smoother. Light does not scatter as much on a smoother surface, so this increases contrast. That makes ferrotyped images better for press photography.

This object has the following keywords:

• Cars
• Kaiser Wilhelm Geschutz
• Land bombardments
• Paris
• Shells
• Street Scenes
• World War I

This object is a member of the following portfolios: