It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. This nation and the world found themselves reeling from the world’s first truly all-encompassing war with mechanized killing on an unparalleled scale, and its aftermath. As hopeful as the ensuing peace might have seemed, the world’s masses still faced unresolved issues left over from war as well as the job of re-building nations, economies, and dealing with the re-entry of hundreds of thousands of military personnel into the everyday fabric of society.

 Within that imposing spectrum, the technology of the early 20^th century continued developing, pulling a weary world’s population into one of the most robust rebuilding periods in human history. In the arts, photography, specifically, was of major significance due to its way of attaching technological development to the way we looked at and regarded ourselves as a people. Photography became a new and important means of visual language, establishing itself as the most democratic of communication forms.  The outbreak of World War I and its inherent violence engendered a new commitment by the world's photographers to document every aspect of the fighting, ending an era of In A Patriotic Mole, A Living Photograph, Louis Kaplan, of Southern Illinois University, writes, “The so-called living photographs and living insignia of Arthur Mole [and John Thomas] are photo-literal attempts to recover the old image of national identity at the very moment when the United States entered the Great War in 1917.Mole's [and Thomas’s] photos assert, bolster, and recover the image of American national identity via photographic imaging. Moreover, these military formations serve as rallying points to support U.S. involvement in the war and to ward off any isolationist tendencies.  In life during wartime, [their] patriotic images function as "nationalist propaganda" and instantiate photo cultural formations of citizenship for both the participants and the consumers of these group photographs.”

The monumentality of this project somewhat overshadows the philanthropic magnanimity of the artists themselves. Instead of prospering from the sale of the images produced, the artists donated the entire income derived to the families of the returning soldiers and to this country’s efforts to re-build their lives as a part of the re-entry process.

Eventually, other photographers, appeared on the scene, a bit later in time than the activity conducted by Mole and Thomas, but all were very clearly inspired by the creativity and monumentality of the duo’s production of the “Living” photograph. One of the most notable of those artists was Eugene Omar Goldbeck. He specialized in the large scale group portrait and photographed important people (Albert Einstein), events, and scenes (Babe Ruth’s New York Yankees in his home town, San Antonio) both locally and around the world (Mt. McKinley). Among his military photographs, the Living Insignia projects are of particular significance as to how he is remembered.