Two months after the armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, Greg, like so many others, must have been becoming tired of the waiting to go home from the Western Front.
Given the hundred years that have passed, none of us alive today knew Greg when he was 19. In later life, though, he was a calm man, who rarely if ever seemed impatient. And he was rational enough to know it was pointless to rail against something he couldn’t influence. This stoical quality seems to come through in this photographic portrait of Greg from his collection:
The photograph is undated, and the location is unknown. But there’s something of a quality of resigned patience about the portrait that seems to say ‘waiting’. So it may date from this limbo period after the armistice and before going home. Possibly it was at Abscon. Wherever it was, his accommodation looks quite comfortable.
The photographer is unknown, too. Could the photo be a selfie? Greg by Greg: an early example of the genre? Certainly he loved to experiment with that sort of thing. It’s unlikely to be a self portrait taken with his Vest Pocket Kodak. That doesn’t have a cable release facility. It is possible, though, that his left hand is covertly operating the shutter release of some other camera. Or the photographer may have been someone else – possibly someone casting a head-like shadow on Greg in the strong low light.
‘The Karsh Portrait’
In the family, we call this photograph ‘the Karsh portrait’ of Greg. That’s not to suggest that it was actually taken by the great portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh. Apart from anything else, young Yousuf would only have been 9 or10 years old at the time! It’s just that the strong lighting and sharp contrasts are vaguely reminiscent of some of Karsh’s later (and greater) portraits. Many fine examples can be found on the photographer’s website here.
