Toronto. If you believe this old advertisement from August 1943’s Popular Photography magazine, familiar scenes and family snaps were doubly welcomed by America’s fighting men when taken with a 4×5 B&J press camera or were enlarged with a B&J Solar enlarger.
In reality, B&J press cameras were second to the mighty Speed Graphic and Graflex cameras of the day.
While I don’t know which American enlarger was most popular, I doubt B&J Solar was at the top of the heap (I had a B&J enlarger at one time). In any case, this ad encouraged photographers – amateur and professional – on the home front to support America’s men at war (the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the alliance between Japan and Germany finally succeeded in pulling America into WW2).
Note: My post title is a riff on the famous civil war tune, “The Hurrah for the Red, White, and Blue“. Also, an earlier post shows Weegee’s Speed Graphic, not the B&J he touts above.