Restoration Obscura: Restoring the Face of a Fallen Airman

Photographs are more than just images; they are echoes of the past, tangible proof that someone lived, that they smiled, that they stood in the sun. But time is unkind, and so is history. Some faces vanish into obscurity, their stories lost to yellowed newsprint and crude reproduction techniques.

For S/Sgt. Alfred F. Waichunas, that was almost his fate. ?

Al was just 21 years old when he was killed in action on April 10, 1945, during a bombing mission over Germany. As the flight engineer and top turret gunner aboard the B-17 Moonlight Mission, he had a critical role—overseeing the aircraft’s mechanical systems and defending it from enemy attacks. But when German Me-262 jets struck his formation near Berlin, the aircraft took fatal damage. In the tight confines of the top turret, there was no room for him to wear a parachute. When the plane was torn apart in midair, he fell 15,000 feet to his death. ?

His body was first buried in Germany by fellow crew members, then repatriated to the United States in 1953. But his only widely available image—a small obituary photo—was printed using the harsh halftone screens of 1945, reducing his face to a crude pattern of dots. The technology that recorded him was the same that erased him. ?

The Challenge: Reconstructing a Face From Dots ?

Newspapers of the 1940s relied on halftone printing, a process that transformed photographs into a grid of tiny ink dots. In 1945, most newspapers used 65-line screens, meaning only 65 dots per inch—coarse, imprecise, and unforgiving. Shadows were swallowed, details were lost, and young men like Al, whose faces appeared in the Killed in Action columns, became little more than ghosts in ink. ?

Restoring such an image is not just a matter of cleaning up a scan. A halftone isn't a photograph—it’s an abstraction of one. Simply enlarging it only amplifies the pattern, and traditional sharpening techniques fail because there is no true detail to enhance. The only way to bring Al's image back was to rebuild him, pixel by pixel. ?

Starting with his obituary photo, I worked through seven rounds of edits, many by hand on a tablet with a stylus, carefully filling in the spaces between the halftone dots to accurately recreate his face. This process required refining, smoothing, and reconstructing the missing details while staying true to his likeness. ?

Once the image was smooth enough, I introduced it to machine learning algorithms, allowing AI to analyze his face and render him in a period-accurate setting. The final result: a fully realized, colorized image of S/Sgt. Alfred Waichunas, standing beside an aircraft in 1945. ?

This is the only color image of him that has ever existed. ?

Why It Matters ?

The past is not just made of facts, dates, and records. It is made of people. People who laughed, who dreamed, who stood on runways waiting for their next mission, unaware that history would reduce them to paragraphs and grainy images. ?

This is why I created Restoration Obscura. ?

With years of historical photography research and restoration experience, I’ve dedicated my work to bringing the lost stories and images of heroes like S/Sgt. Waichunas into focus—and into color. This is more than restoring photographs. It is restoring memory. It is giving the past the dignity it deserves. ?

Because history is not just something we remember. It is something we see. And some stories—some faces—are too important to fade away. We owe them that much.

You can learn more at www.restorationobscura.com

? 2025 John Bulmer Photography. All rights reserved.