Alice Welford's Photojournal

Alice Welford's Photojournal

Photographs bound in a book with captions

A small album filled with 251 photographs of various sizes. About two-thirds of these pictures are labeled with names or general captions about the scenery. Ms. Welford was a nurse with the military who traveled to Malta, Gibraltar, and France from 1915 to 1918. Her travels are reflected in her photography. She not only took pictures of fellow nurses and soldiers, but of funerals, locals, and the ocean. Her captions are affectionate at times but also starkly real about the situations she found herself in: military funerals, typhoid patients, and soldiers on leave. Two-thirds of the way through the album, the photos cease to be labeled, but continue to be the same kinds of photographs, of the people she sees and the scenery. It is thought that Welford was separated from her photo album at some point and was unable to continue captioning her photos. Welford's photography serves as another form of materializing and memorializing a difficult and almost incomprehensible period. Her photographs take the challenging situation of nursing wounded and dying men and give faces to the names, smiles to the pain, and scenery to the place names. In this way, her photography is physically separate from written accounts of the period, but is also undeniably connected to these accounts. Welford drowned in the Tigris River on January 15, 1918.

Alice Welford (1887-1918)

McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa. 2933 E. 6th St. Tulsa, Oklahoma 74104-3123

McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa. 2933 E. 6th St. Tulsa, Oklahoma 74104-3123

1915-1918

Photojournal

English

2010.064.1

Spain, Malta, France

Photojournal

16 cm x 20 cm