Photography carried out for military purposes by service personnel or civilian auxiliaries. Although often treated as synonymous with war photography, the latter has concentrated more on actual combat, and been more journalistic in character. Military photography mainly serves functional training, organizational, and technical needs of little interest to the public at large, including military geography, intelligence gathering, and weapons research. While some famous individuals—for example, Edward Steichen and David Douglas Duncan—have worked for the military, most military photographers have been relatively anonymous.
War has generated millions of functional photographs. Already during the American Civil War (1861-5) the camera was extensively used by General Hermann Haupt, head of the US Military Railroad Bureau, by the federal medical authorities, and the Army Medical Museum (f. 1862), and by the North's organizer-in-chief, US Quartermaster-General Montgomery Meigs. During the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), the Japanese Army Photography Unit (f. 1894) took 4, 847 photographs in Manchuria. In the world wars of the 20th century, organizations such as the US Army Signal Corps produced hundreds of thousands of images. French military photographers took c.90, 000 pictures in Indo-China in 1944-55. In the Vietnam War (1965-75), photographers were deployed by the US army, air force, Coastguard, Marine Corps, and navy; and at the height of the conflict c. 10, 000 pictures were reportedly being created by the army alone every month. Even limited campaigns like the Falklands War (1982) were heavily photographed.
Military organizations adopt technical innovations that appear directly relevant to their aims. Photography's principal appeal lay in its unparalleled reproductive precision and ability to record detail, and armies first concerned themselves with it in the mid-19th century, usually adapting existing techniques to their own purposes.
Military geography
It was in this field that photography first established itself. Precise knowledge of the theatre of operations, achieved by accurate surveying and mapping of terrain, can be of decisive military importance. In the American Civil War photography was extensively used for surveying, map-making, and reproducing engineering plans. In the First World War the Austrian Military-Geographical Institute alone produced some 120 million maps.
Military-geographical tasks were often assigned to army engineers. In Britain the Royal Engineers used photography from the mid-1850s, and from 1856 taught it at their base in Chatham. The War Office's Board of Ordnance also adopted it, and under General Henry James a studio was established at Southampton charged mainly with the enlargement and reduction of maps. In 1859 James reported his achievements to a parliamentary committee, and the following year Captain Donnelly of the Royal Engineers claimed in the Photographic Journal that using photography could save the Survey Office c. £1, 600 a year. In France, Colonel Aimé Laussedat (1819-1907) began to experiment with photogrammetry and topographical photography at the end of the 1850s. In 1861 his methods were adopted by the War Ministry, which also decreed that every brigade should have an officer proficient in photography (Disdéri trained them). The Prussian General Staff established a studio in 1868. Here too, military geography was the priority, and in 1867-8 the War Ministry commissioned photogrammetric experiments by Albrecht Meydenbauer (1834-1921), but was not convinced by the results. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1) a ‘Field Photography Detachment’ was set up under Engineer Captain Burchardi and conducted photogrammetric surveys of the fortifications of Strasbourg, Paris, and other places. However, they were completed too late to be used. Comparable work was done in Italy (Paganini, Ferero, Manzi) and Austria (von Hübl, von Orel, Scheimpflug). In 1907 von Orel, with Zeiss, developed the stereo-autograph, an instrument that greatly facilitated the drawing of maps from photographs.
Intelligence gathering
Photo-assisted topographical surveys are closely related to reconnaissance of hostile territory, positions, and activities, under the heading of ‘photographic intelligence’ (a subcategory, today, of ‘imagery intelligence’). In the Crimean War (1853-6), sappers photographed enemy positions prior to mining them, and the British HMS Hecla conducted photographic surveys of Russia's Baltic ports. The German navy carried out coastal surveys from 1881, and in the 1880s photographic intelligence gathering on land and sea became commonplace, with installations like fortifications and naval dockyards of particular interest. Staff officers lured into compromising situations could expect to have their papers copied by increasingly sophisticated means. Military observers of foreign wars, such as the British and German officers attached to Japanese forces in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), also had an intelligence-gathering function.
Particularly important was aerial reconnaissance. Experiments were done by Nadar, Laussedat, and others in the late 1850s, and in 1862 General McClellan's troops used balloon pictures in the siege of Richmond, Virginia. But the systematic creation of aerial units did not take place until later, when, for example, balloon detachments were set up in Germany (1884) and Britain (1890). In 1907-10 the Saxon engineer officer Alfred Maul experimented with cameras mounted on rockets, gyroscopically stabilized, and recovered by parachute. The results were good enough for the system to be used by Bulgaria in its war with Turkey in 1912. But in 1911 (also against Turkey) the Italians had taken reconnaissance photographs from aeroplanes; a British observer at the French army manoeuvres of 1911 had flown with French pilots and taken excellent pictures; and the French army had used aerial photography during the second Moroccan crisis. But it was the First World War that produced the most spectacular advances. When British troops attacked at Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, it was with maps prepared—for the first time in the history of warfare—solely from photographic reconnaissance. Automated, motorized cameras, filters to penetrate haze, and dampers to reduce vibration were among the war's most important technical developments, in conjunction with longer-range, more stable aircraft. Overlap in systematically produced images created a stereoscopic effect, allowing specialists to discern trenches, ammunition stockpiles, camouflaged batteries, and other traces of enemy activity. Intelligence officers became increasingly skilled at interpreting pictures and combining them with other kinds of information.
In the inter-war years the British introduced the F24 aerial camera (1925), and used photography effectively in theatres like India's North-West Frontier. German planners, however, took a more holistic approach: ‘The military organisation that has the best photographic intelligence’, wrote the army commander-in-chief General Werner von Fritsch in 1938, ‘will win the next war’. By 1939 Germany had plentiful reconnaissance aircraft and 5, 200 ground personnel. (During the war, however, German photographic reconnaissance was hampered by poor interpretation and inadequate integration with other intelligence sources.) The Second World War brought further advances in all branches of photographic intelligence gathering. Allied air reconnaissance units became capable of rapidly mapping contested territories with the use of automatic cameras and industrial processing; the RAF produced over 6 million images during the last year of combat alone. Periscope photography from submarines became increasingly important, with German technology (the Primarflex camera) pre-eminent. Major assaults such as the Normandy invasion (1944) were preceded by picture taking on an immense scale by Resistance agents (some using the Kodak MB spy camera), and from ships, submarines, and aircraft. Another elaborate Allied reconnaissance operation was the 1943-4 campaign to locate and identify German V-1 and V-2 missiles.
In the second half of the 20th century all major armed forces possessed the capacity to make and interpret intelligence photographs, although the most sophisticated and expensive facilities were monopolized by the superpowers. Notable was the American National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), a branch of the CIA organized by Arthur C. Lundahl in the mid-1950s but not officially inaugurated until 18 January 1961. Intelligence-gathering technology developed continually. The Lockheed U-2 spy plane (1955) was capable, with its Perkin-Elmer cameras, of recording a golf ball on a putting green from 16, 775m (55, 000 ft), and it was the U-2, in conjunction with low-level photography by conventional aircraft, that identified Russian missile sites during the Cuban Missile Crisis of August-October 1962. By this time the American Samos and Russian Cosmos programmes were beginning a new era of satellite-based reconnaissance—a form of intelligence gathering that, combined with infrared, ultraviolet, and digital technology, continued to advance rapidly at the beginning of the 21st century. On the modern ‘digital battlefield’ the near-instantaneous exchange of images between satellites, aircraft, ground troops, and theatre commanders provides unprecedented quantities of data for targeting, damage assessment, and other tactical purposes.
Weapons technology
Also of considerable military importance is visual documentation of the behaviour and effects of munitions, from bullets to torpedoes, missiles, and nuclear bombs. Initially the British army was particularly innovative. Photography was adopted by the Royal Artillery at Woolwich in 1859, and by 1866 attempts were being made to record projectiles in flight. However, precise ballistic studies had to wait until the medium was more advanced. In 1882-3 the French army also experimented at a range near Calais. But it was Ernst Mach, working in Prague in 1885-6, who made the decisive breakthrough. In Germany Ottomar Anschütz worked regularly for the military, for example photographing projectiles at the Gruson works at Magdeburg in 1889. The effects of impact and explosions, for example on armour plate, were also photographed. Manufacturers increasingly took their own photographs, and the Krupp Archive in Essen contains many pictures of firing tests from 1875 onwards. These were used for both record and advertising purposes, establishing the armaments industry's widespread practice of enlisting still photography, film, and ultimately computer graphics to show off its products.
Other uses
Although surveying, intelligence gathering, and weapons research account for a high proportion of the military photographs taken since the 1850s, they are not exhaustive. From the Crimean War onwards, medical photography, embracing the handling of wounded personnel, surgery, hospitals, and rehabilitation programmes, was a major field. Since the Franco-Prussian War, microphotography, e.g. the Second World War airgraph, has been extensively used to convey documents. Combat photographs, particularly in the 20th century, have been taken in vast numbers for armed-forces journals such as Parade, Stars & Stripes, and Leatherneck and publications by the British Ministry of Information; release to the press; and other informational/propaganda purposes. In peacetime, photography has played an important public-relations role, showing troops on peacekeeping missions or rescuing taxpayers from natural disasters, and for recruitment. Not to be forgotten, finally, are duties relating to heads of state: over 40 years, for example, the British Royal Naval Photographic Branch took over 100, 000 photographs of life aboard the royal yacht Britannia.
— Jens Jaeger/Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Kiesling, M., Die Anwendung der Photographie zu militärischen Zwecken (1893).
- Babington Smith, C., Evidence in Camera: The Story of Photographic Intelligence in World War 2 (1958).
- Brookes, A.J., Photo Reconnaissance (1975).
- Sekula, A., ‘The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War’,
Artforum , 14 (1975). - Davis, K.F., “‘A Terrible Distinctness: Photography of the Civil War Era’”, in M. A. Sandweiss (ed.), Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (1991).
- Brugioni, D., From Balloons to Blackbirds: Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Imagery Intelligence (1993)
