Quote:
Originally Posted by Clodfobble
..For me, the thing I like is the historical photos get surprisingly humanized for me with color. I would never have realized it until I saw it differently, but the black and white (apparently) lends it a sense of "not really us." That's often the purposeful effect of an artistic photographer, but it can also lend a sense of "not really relevant" to today, which is decidedly not the point of a documentary news photographer.
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Most people assume that because 99.99% of the photos they have seen of WW II are B&W, that there was no color film at the time. In fact there was and it was a conscious decision not to use color film when reporting on the war or documenting it for the very reasons you state.
People back home saw the war through an extra layer of abstraction by viewing it in black and white. Allowing them to see color images would have made the ghastly-ness more real and evident.
Another, more practical, reason is that color film was still relatively rare and expensive. It was used by intelligence though as it held more information than b&w.
There is an article about this topic somewhere and a number of youtube videos of combat footage filmed in color.