During World War II, babies in England were fitted with baby-sized gas masks that were comically large. Like the best archival images, it needs almost no explanation — the frame tells its own story.
Gas masks became household objects in Britain during the late 1930s, when the government issued tens of millions of respirators — including versions for babies — in anticipation of air raids. Photographs of masked civilians going about ordinary routines are among the most unsettling images of the era precisely because the gas attacks they prepared for never came to British cities.
History is usually written down long after it happens, but a photograph is made in the moment itself. That immediacy is what keeps images like this one circulating decades after the event they show.
