Estonian Photos - Part 1

 Estonian Photos

I have been publishing Ivy League (Yale) nude posture photos, and there are more to come.  Similar photos were taken by the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy in the 1940s to document incoming recruits.

Above is a photo taken by the Army at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, a processing center for Army recruits during World War II.

This photo of Navy recruit J. W. King was taken at the pre-flight training school at St. Mary's in California.  I have collected all the Fort Sheridan and St. Mary's nude photos that I could find, a few dozen each.

So you can imagine my delight when a friend in San Francisco told me about a collection of similar photos from a museum in Estonia.  The collection contains photos of hundreds of young men, photographed from the front ...

the rear ...

and the side.  The pole in the middle is for measuring their height; the markings are every 5 centimeters.  None of the men are identified by name, just by number.

The photos can be downloaded in extremely high resolution, such as the one above (click on the photo above for a larger image), and I downloaded a few that way, but that took forever (several minutes per photo, because they were so huge).  So most of these photos are medium-resolution images.

Who are these guys, and when were the photos taken?  The Estonian source provided no information.  My friend guessed that they are military recruits, which makes sense given their uniformly young age.  The photos may have been taken not to evaluate posture, like the Yale posture photos, but to document the physical condition of the incoming recruits, like the U.S. Army and Navy did.

The photos probably date from between World War I and World War II, when Estonia was an independent country.  Before WWI, Estonia was part of Imperial Russia, and after WWII it was part of the Soviet Union until the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.

In some of the photos, like this set, the guys' faces and hands are dark.  My friend thought they were farm boys with tanned faces and hands, but it doesn't look like a tan to me.  The faces and hands look dirty, like what you see on coal miners.  There are no coal mines in Estonia, but there are oil shale mines, or the guys may have been working at some other dirty job.

This guy, number 723, is the last one in the set of Estonian photos, but never fear, I have hundreds more.

All three of these images of number 723 are high-resolution, so click on them for a larger view.

And if any of you have any information about these Estonian photos, please let me know.