text: C A M O U P E D I A: March 2010
  From Carol Burke, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight: Gender, Folklore and Changing Military Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004, p. 88—
  Camouflage no longer camouflages. The point is not to blend into the landscape but to stand out as a guerrilla-in-waiting. For white supremacists, store-bought BDUs [battle dress uniforms] lend a spurious authenticity to ragtag renegade activities and permit them to see themselves as a vigilant militia organized in defense of fundamental American values.
  Labels: blending, figure-ground, uniforms
  From Don Hawkins, Flambeau at Darkcorp.com. Kregel Publications, 1999, p. 98—
  Like tart cherries in a cherry pie, humor is what gives sarcasm its unique torch. Otherwise, it would simply be called anger. There's nothing wrong with anger, of course, but sarcasm provides our clients with the opportunity to become angry, even vindictive, without appearing that way. It's a lot like the carefully patterned camouflage jackets some of your clients wear when they go hunting or to war.
  Labels: deception, humor, masks
  Above Cover of Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye by Harvard psychologist and art theorist Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007). Having studied with Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler at the University of Berlin, he was the last surviving student of the founders of Gestalt psychology.
  Max Wertheimer and Pablo Picasso were contemporaries: The former, who co-founded Gestalt theory with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler, was born in 1880; while the Spanish painter, who invented cubism with Georges Braque, was born in 1881. Both Gestalt theory and cubism emerged in the years that preceded World War I. Gestaltist Fritz Heider does not suggest that Wertheimer and Picasso were acquainted, or even that they knew about each other's discoveries, but only that "the perceptual phenomena with which they were dealing were the same" (Heider 1973, 71). However, it also seems likely, as he points out, that both realized that the factors that they were exploring were used in military camouflage. More…
  Labels: art and the brain, Cubism, Gestalt theory, Rudolf Arnheim, World War I
  From Paul Ekman, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage. NY: W.W. Norton, 2009, p. 33—
  The best way to conceal strong emotions is with a mask. Covering the face or part of it with one's hand or turning away from the person one is talking to usually can't be done without giving the lie away. The best mask is a false emotion. It not only misleads, but it is the best camouflage. It is terribly hard to keep the face impassive or the hands inactive when an emotion is felt strongly. Looking unemotional, cool, or neutral is the hardest appearance to maintain when emotions are felt. It is much easier to put on a pose, to stop or counter with another set of actions those actions that are expressions of the felt emotion.
  Labels: masks, social camouflage
  In reading about this, we were reminded of Jerzy Kosinski's novel, The Painted Bird, but in this case the birds were not literally painted. On page 81 of the January 1941 issue of Popular Science (as shown above), it was reported that retired US Army Captain Ray R. Delhauer, an expert on carrier pigeons, had been breeding them to be disruptively patterned and thereby better camouflaged. These birds were used to transport secret messages, which were placed inside a small capsule, inserted into the bird's crop, and retrieved by a gentle massage when the bird had completed its mission.
  Labels: animal camouflage, World War II
  A participant in World War I was a British (presumably Canadian) soldier with the initials JM who was also an amateur artist. He served in France and Belgium with the Royal Horse and Field Artillery in 1917-18. Two volumes of his watercolor paintings and pen-and-ink drawings have survived (130 works total), and are among the holdings of the Special Collections Library at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where they have been digitized and can now be viewed online. Of particular relevance to the history of camouflage is the cover of the first volume (shown here), which includes a full-color caricature of a dazzle-painted ship.
  Posted by Roy R. Behrens at 4:16 PM
  These are thought-provoking excerpts from Kristofer Hansson's essay "Camouflage" in Orvar Löfgren and Richard R. Wilk, eds., Off the Edge: Experiments in Cultural Analysis. Ethnologia Europaea, Vol 35. Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006—
  In cultural camouflage one has to identify these sharp edges, the behavior, traits or ideas that are not accepted as normal, and mask or obscure them. The individual must learn to know when it is important to blur these edges—which can be either a conscious or unconscious process.
  We all have bodily and psychological characteristics that we don't want people to know about. To protect ourselves we use different strategies to blur and hide those unwanted qualities under a surface of acceptable characteristics and qualities. This transformation is sometimes an everyday mundane action allowing us to blend into different social settings. Most of the time we imitate a typical group member and merge into a larger group. Examples include dressing like others, trying to talk about the same topics, and so forth. This is something we often do without any reflection…
  Camouflage strategies are constantly at work in everyday life when you have an illness or handicap that you don't want others to know about. With the use of the military metaphor we can understand that an illness creates, in different ways, sharp edges, features that stand out. To use a camouflage strategy is to break up these sharp edges so that the boundaries between oneself and the surrounding background of normal or healthy bodies is blurred.
  Labels: blending, deception, social camouflage
  Shown here are three stages in a demonstration of the protective coloration (or natural camouflage) of a pheasant, as devised by American artists and naturalists Abbott H. Thayer and his son Gerald H. Thayer. These and other artifacts were exhibited by the Thayers as instructive lessons at various schools and museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago. Following World War I (c1919-1920), these were also reproduced in popular US magazines. The top image shows the disruptive surface pattern on a pheasant, as seen against a field of white. In the second image, the same bird is shown in the context of a presumably typical setting—and, of course, voila!, it disappears. The third is an image that we created, to show the pheasant's location in the more or less natural setting above. Like the Thayers' other camouflage demonstrations, these may not offer definitive proof of anything, but they are still quite interesting.
  Labels: Abbott H. Thayer, animal camouflage, World War I
  Fake inflatable tanks and stage production equipment have not been known as popular methods of defense within World War II history, but the University of Michigan will showcase an exhibit that shows these devices as a little-known-but-effective part of the US Armed Forces.
  The University of Michigan's Hatcher Undergraduate Library will show a documentary at 7:00 pm March 17, 2010, on the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops [aka the Ghost Army], deployed in Normandy in June 1944. It will be shown along with an exhibit of textual materials and pictures of war experiences. More…
  Labels: deception, documentaries, Ghost Army, mimicry, World War II
  From a letter by British sculptor Henry Moore to Arthur Sale, dated October 8, 1939, as published in Alan G. Wilkinson, ed., Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2002, p. 133—
  …when the time comes that I'm asked, or have got to do something in this war [World War II], I hope it will be something less destructive than taking part in the actual fighting and killing. There ought to be ways of being used even as a sculptor,—in making of splints etc, or jobs connected with plastic surgery,—though the most likely thing I suppose is camouflage work.
  Labels: camouflage artists, sculptors, World War II
  Shown here are two of the patent drawings for camouflaged clothing invented by Douglas N. Hamilton, and registered as US Patent Number 5,010,589, dated April 30, 1991. Intended for hunters or soldiers, it has two advantages that come from its use of removable fringe (see 13) that hangs below the sleeves. One advantage (for hunters) is that scents or lures could be applied to the fringe only, instead of applying them to the main garment. Different scents could be applied to different sets of fringes, and then easily interchanged. In addition, according to the patent's text, the fringe "break[s] up the outline of the human body of the user and thus improves the camouflage of the wearer."
  This reminds us of a passage in Eliot Wigginton, Foxfire 5. Garden City NY: Anchor Books, 1979, p. 411—
  When asked about their buckskins, Hawk said, "The story is that it [the leather fringe] helped water drain off in a downpour instead of soaking into the cloth, but I don't go along with that…But I believe that one thing that it did do, whether they realized it or not: it helped to break up the silhouette when they were in the woods. I mean, if you were dripping with fringes and things, you would blend in with the woods easier than if you were just a hard silhouette."
  Labels: buckskin, camouflage clothing, fringe, patents
  From Lawrence Wright, Perspective in Perspective. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983, p. 280—
  If architecture is not to give external expression to the main plan forms and the structural method, it verges on camouflage, a form of undesign in which many architects and perspectors have served their country, putting their normal principles into reverse; gamekeepers turned poachers.
  Labels: architecture, distortion, forced perspective
  From James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1996, pp. 82-83—
  Sometimes I dress to fit in, so that I can blend with the crowd and not attract attention. When I do that I am imagining the world as a picture, and I want to find a place in the picture where I can disappear. As I walk down the sidewalk or enter the conference room, I want to be nothing more than a blotch among other blotches. But on many other occasions I have exactly the opposite effect in mind. I dress in my best clothes, and I make sure I look just right, because I want to make an impression: I need to stand out, I want to be noticed.
  In a post-World War I article on "Aeronautical Camouflage" (Aerial Age Weekly, May 10, 1920, pp. 288-289ff), its author William R. Weigler (who was in charge of camouflage at McCook Field, now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton OH) contends that "The design of aircraft camouflage closely follows…[the] color schemes of the snake or fish. Both are round in form and in general have two distinct systems of coloration, one on the top, a mottled colored pattern and the other on the underside, a light tone of color, blending on the sides so as to eliminate all shadow effects." In one of the photographs accompanying the article (above left), there are four model airplanes, three of which are painted in monochrome khaki, black and clear varnish, while a fourth (to the left of the orange dot) has been disruptively painted with six colors, ranging "from light tan to dark blue green." In another experiment (above top right), the undersides of a model have been painted in a lozenge pattern which, viewed from a sufficient distance, merges into a continuous tone that simulates "a sky color." Below that is a more or less similar scheme against a sky background.
  Above is another photograph from the same article. It shows six disruptively painted airplanes, each of which has been camouflaged with varying degrees of success. In particular, there is an effectively disrupted plane near the bottom left of the photograph, slightly left of center. Despite its camouflage, it can be easily located because of the target-like bull's-eye insignias on its wings.
  Labels: airplane camouflage, lozenge pattern, World War I
  Disruptive ship camouflage (called dazzle camouflage) was apparently always popular with the American public. In 1918, as reported in an issue of Popular Science Monthly, dazzle-painted miniatures of a torpedo boat (right) and a submarine were featured at a Liberty Loan fund-raising event on the Charles River. According to the article, "The torpedo boat, towing the submarine, cruised back and forth in the basin, while large crowds from Boston and Cambridge lined the banks and cheered the oddly painted craft." Of the various ways of selling Liberty Bonds, it continues, "this was the most novel, inspiring and appealing."
  Posted by Roy R. Behrens at 7:55 AM
  Labels: dazzle camouflage, ship camouflage, World War I
  From Lilian Jackson Braun, The Cat Who Could Read Backwards. Jove 1986, p. 34—
  "You're a fun dancer," she said. "It takes real coordination to fox-trot to a cha-cha. But we must do something about your art education. Would you like me to tutor you?"
  "I don't know if I could afford you—on my salary," he said, and Sandy's laughter could be heard above the orchestra. "How about the little lady from the other newspaper? Is she an art expert?"
  'Her husband was a camouflage artist in World War I," said Sandy. "I guess that makes her an expert."