Introduction
Perhaps no event susceptible to being photographed has received more attention than war. Many groups have been interested in the camera's precise visual documentation of the people, places, and activities of warfare: military officers and decision makers in the field; political decision makers at home; opponents of war seeking visual proof of its horrors and inhumanity; ordinary citizens trying to visualize the places in which armies confront each other, and loved ones are fighting or have fought; and ex-combatants seeking mementoes of their comrades-in-arms, camps and equipment, and the people and landscapes encountered on campaigns far from home. When wars are over, societies seek visual means of commemorating the sites of heroic turning points or tragic loss.
Artists fulfilled these needs entirely before 1839. Photography first supplemented, then in the 20th century largely replaced the artist as visual recorder of the preparations preceding combat, the fighting itself, and its horrific consequences for humans and their environment. From photography's beginnings, even when the bulky and cumbersome equipment needed for daguerreotypes, calotypes, and wet-plate photographs narrowly restricted photographers' movements in the field, photographic entrepreneurs were quick to seize opportunities to act either as independent operators or as official observers of military operations.
War photography went through several stages before 1920, corresponding roughly to advances in photographic technology. Before the wet-plate process was announced by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851, the earliest war photographs were daguerreotypes or calotypes which, with their long exposures, produced relatively static, staged photographs of men in uniform, landscapes, and buildings (whole or ruined). Although it cut exposure times, the wet-plate process obliged photographers to carry both a darkroom or dark-tent and supplies of water and chemicals with them into the field. This meant in practice that subjects were still limited to static personnel, fortifications and other installations, and the human and material debris of battle. Notwithstanding the assumption that photography (unlike art) produced true images of reality, for aesthetic, practical, or propaganda reasons photographers could and did frame or stage the images they captured. Even after the advent of dry-plate technology c.1880 freed photographers from the need to process their pictures immediately, large-format cameras continued to make the best-quality negatives, requiring photographers to carry bulky tripods. Throughout the 19th century, therefore, the camera remained a ‘distant witness’.
The majority of war photographs taken before c.1900 did not reach broad audiences through publication, although many served as the basis for engravings published in popular journals such as Harpers Illustrated Weekly or the Illustrated London News. By the end of the 19th century, photographs could be reproduced in daily newspapers, and photographers began to function as war correspondents. War photographers attempted to support themselves by exhibiting in galleries, or publishing books of their photographs: commercial enterprises which ensured that the most repulsive images of carnage tended to be avoided.
Bibliography
- Lewinski, J., The Camera at War: War Photography from 1848 to the Present Day (1978).
- ‘La Guerre’,
La Recherche photographique ,6 (1989). - Voir ne pas voir la guerre: histoire des représentations historiques de la guerre (2001).
- ‘Krieg und Fotografie’,
Fotogeschichte , 85-6 (2002). - Bolloch, J., War Photography (2004)
Early conflicts
Susan Sontag noted that while modern sentiment assumes that the absence of war is normal, in fact normality is the presence of war, a ‘normality’ that has so far prevailed throughout photography's history. In the medium's first two decades, despite the technical limitations already mentioned, skilled amateurs and experienced professionals produced a significant record of military activity in the war between Mexico and the United States (1846-8); in small uprisings in the British Empire (the Punjab, 1848-9; Burma, 1852), and larger conflicts like the Crimean War (1853-6); the Indian Rebellion (1857-8); and the Second Opium War in China (1858-60). The small group of photographers who preceded the large-scale documentation of the American Civil War (1861-5) began to define the earliest subjects of war photography: posed portraiture of officers and men; panoramas of camps, supplies and transport arrangements; records of the destruction of buildings and landscape; and propaganda for governments and causes.
The Mexican War began in the spring of 1846 when General Zachary Taylor invaded disputed territory after the American annexation of Texas, ending with the capture of Mexico City (late 1847) and the 1848 treaty by which the USA ‘purchased’ part of northern Mexico. Although several American daguerreotypists were active in Mexico from the early 1840s, it is difficult to identify the photographers responsible for the first war photographs. More than 50 images in the Amon Carter Museum at Fort Worth, Texas, and at Yale, depict a variety of military scenes: soldiers in Saltillo, occupied after the American victory at Buena Vista in February 1847; an artillery battalion in a mountain pass; graves of the dead; portraits of officers. Little contemporary attention was paid to these daguerreotypes, the public evidently preferring the more heroic renderings in widely distributed coloured engravings.
John McCosh, the first identified war photographer, was an amateur. A surgeon in the Bengal Infantry, he first created calotypes in 1844 while stationed in the Himalayas, and later took additional views during the Sikh War in 1848 and the Second Burma War in 1852. His images are primarily portraits of friends, although those from 1852 include scenes of ruined buildings, and artillery and troops posed in the foreground of a grand pagoda in Prome (Burma).
Roger Fenton is the first photographer to bequeath images of a major conflict. The Crimean War, in which Russia fought Britain, France, Turkey, and eventually Sardinia, centred on Russia's Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol. Fenton was preceded in the Crimea by Karl von Szathmary, who followed the Russian army in 1854, and exhibited photographs (now lost) in Paris in 1855. The British military authorities commissioned Richard Nicklin to record coastal installations, but he and his photographs vanished in a Black Sea hurricane in 1854. Fenton, funded by the publishers Thomas Agnew & Sons and with letters of introduction from Prince Albert, arrived in late March 1855 and in the following weeks, using the new wet-plate process, created 360 Crimean images. However, although his carefully posed photographs have been criticized for ignoring the harsh realities of war that he described so eloquently in his correspondence, long-held assumptions that he was on a propaganda mission to counter reports of military mismanagement seem unsupported by the evidence. The last stages of the conflict were documented by the French panorama painter and photographer Jean-Charles Langlois (1789-1870) and the Scotsman James Robertson and his Italian-born brother-in-law Felice A. Beato. They were the first to photograph corpses on a battlefield.
Bibliography
- James, L., Crimea 1854-56: The War with Russia from Contemporary Photographs (1981).
- Robichon, F., and Rouillé, A., Jean-Charles Langlois: la photographie, la peinture, la guerre (1992).
- Keller, U., The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War (2001)
Roger Fenton 'The Valley of the Shadow of Death', 1855
India and China
Beato and Robertson went from the Crimea to India, where in 1857-8 the Indian Rebellion broke out and was eventually suppressed in the northern province of Bengal, with savagery on both sides. Shortly after its beginning, Harriet (1827-1907) and Robert Tytler (1819-72) took nearly 500 large-format calotypes of events in Delhi. Beato was sent by the War Office to Lucknow, after the capture of the city in April 1858, and made 60 glass-plate negatives, primarily of damage to buildings in the city.
From India, Beato travelled to China in 1858 with a British army sent to enforce trade concessions wrested from the Chinese after the First Opium War (1839-42). During the autumn of 1860 he accompanied the Anglo-French forces attacking Peking (Beijing), returning to England with 102 images, including the first known photographs of that city. Presented in albums and sold commercially to a Victorian public, Beato's photographs mostly but not entirely avoided the gruesome details of destruction and death, concentrating on panoramas that showed the beauty of the landscape and the power of the victorious British army.
Bibliography
- Harris, D., Of Battle and Beauty: Felice Beato's Photographs of China (1999)
The American Civil War
From the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, on 12 April 1861 until the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, on 9 April 1865, photographers were present at almost every major event, created a comprehensive record of the people and places affected by conflict, and left a visual legacy that changed the way in which the war was remembered both by those who fought in it and those who did not. The limitations of wet-plate technology still prevented them from photographing action, although unlike most of their predecessors, they did not flinch from recording the ghastly aftermath of battle. In America's Bloodiest Day: The Battle of Antietam 1862 (1978), William Frassanito brilliantly analysed one of the single most gruesome collections of battlefield photographs in relation to the action. The bulk of Civil War photography, however, records not battles but less dramatic images of the men and armies that fought them. In Alan Trachtenberg's words, ‘without the means to idealize persons and actions, photographers in the Civil War focused on the mundane, on camp life, on drills and picket lines and artillery batteries. They saw the war essentially … as a unique form of everyday life.’ That life was experienced by some 3 million men who served in the Union and Confederate armies, of whom 360, 000 Federal and 250, 000 Confederate soldiers died, while another 500, 000 were wounded.
Unlike earlier small-scale war photography by individuals or partners, during the American Civil War a successful photographic business model emerged of substantial investment in equipment and supplies, trained photographer-employees, and sustained marketing efforts through widespread distribution; herein lay the origins of wartime photojournalism. Photographers in the field followed Fenton's practice of working from well-equipped and -supplied mobile darkrooms. Mathew Brady has become synonymous with Civil War photography, but his system of sending photographic teams into the field, though extensive, was only one of many. By August 1862, 35 photographic operations were producing war-related images. By 1865 the Federal military authorities had authorized more than 300 photographers to enter encampments and other military zones. In the Confederacy, photographers were hampered by the Federal blockade, which cut off their supplies, but another c.100 photographers worked similarly throughout the South. In camp, daguerreotypists, tintypists, and photographers set up photographic tents to provide soldiers with portraits and memorabilia of army life. The New York photographic firm E. & H. T. Anthony made a fortune supplying both sides with equipment and chemicals. The Anthony brothers also systematically purchased negatives, and published and sold thousands of stereographs and cartes de visite. In addition to Brady, their photographers included Thomas C. Roche, George N. Barnard, Alexander Gardner, and Timothy O'Sullivan.
The US government employed photographers systematically throughout the war: the Treasury Department, Army Medical Museum, the Ordnance Department, the Department of Engineers, the Quartermaster-General, and the Bureau of Military Railroads all maintained a photographic staff. Andrew J. Russell (1830-1902), working under General Hermann Haupt, extensively documented the construction and destruction of railroads and bridges. Barnard worked for the Topographical Branch of Engineers in the Armies of the Potomac and the Cumberland, making photographic copies of maps used by officers in the field. Assigned to the west in 1863, he documented the massive logistical build-up in Tennessee, the siege of Atlanta, Georgia, and General William Sherman's march to the sea. In addition to military photographers, the army also employed civilians such as Samuel A. Cooley, who operated a studio in Beaufort, South Carolina, documenting the invasion of the southern coast in the autumn of 1862, selling images both to the public and to Quartermaster-General Montgomery Meigs.
Supply shortages made it harder for the Confederacy to create comparable documentation. Studios such as that of George S. Cook in Charleston, George W. Minnis in Richmond, Virginia, and Andrew D. Lytle in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, did a steady business in portraits of Confederate civilian and military leaders and pictures of camp life, as long as chemicals and other necessities from the Anthony brothers could be smuggled through to them. Lytle even managed to photograph Union fortifications secretly and signal the location of Union forces to nearby Confederate troops.
Sold as individual images and in numbered series such as Brady's Photographic Views of the War (1862) during hostilities, Civil War photographs also appeared in several major publishing efforts. They formed the basis for wood engravings in mass-circulation illustrated papers like Harper's Weekly and Leslie's Illustrated News. After the war, some photographers published memorial albums of mounted photographs, notably Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866), and Barnard's Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign (1866). In 1911-12, Francis Miller edited a ten-volume Photographic History of the Civil War, capitalizing on fading and sentimentalized memories of the conflict.
Major collections of Civil War photographs include those at the National Archives, and the Civil War Collection of the Library of Congress, whose 7, 000 images are digitized and available online. Thousands more are held by museums and historical societies across the USA; many were used by Ken Burns in his 1990 television epic The American Civil War.
Mathew Brady Self-portrait after his return from Bull Run, 22 July 1861. Albumen print
Other wars to 1914
Outside the USA, between the 1860s and 1914, photography was used on an increasing scale to record conflict. (Functional military photography also continued to develop.) Among relatively few surviving images of the Wars of Italian Unification (1859-70) were pictures by Gustave Le Gray of Palermo in June 1860, just after its capture by Garibaldi. A classic of early staged photography was Gioacchino Altobelli's (1814-78) image of Italian troops ‘storming’ Rome's Porto Pia on 21 September 1870, the day after the actual event. More photographers were involved in the Wars of German Unification (1864-71), culminating in the Franco-Prussian conflict (1870-1). Friedrich Brandt photographed captured Danish fortifications at Düppel (1864), and Paul Sinner and Karl Schwier the—by 19th-century standards—enormous devastation of Strasbourg after the Prussian siege (1870). Thousands of miles away in South America, the Uruguayan photographer Esteban Garcia recorded the War of the Triple Alliance (Paraguay versus Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, 1865-70) for an American company, and the Chilean Eduardo Spencer recorded episodes of the war between Chile and Peru in 1879-83. But photographers still faced major obstacles: cumbersome equipment, long exposures, and the impossibility of large-scale publication of campaign photographs except in engraved form; the biggest market was for contact-printed carte portraits of military and political leaders.
By c.1900 this situation was being transformed, thanks to portable dry-plate or roll-film cameras, ‘instantaneous’ shutter speeds, and the half-tone printing process. These innovations shaped photographic coverage of the Spanish-American (1898), Boer (1899-1902), and Russo-Japanese (1904-5) wars. All three created massive demand for images, and news organizations and firms like Biograph and Underwood & Underwood spent heavily on obtaining them. A leading Boer War photographer was Horace Nicholls, who in 1899 and 1900 made his reputation with scenes from Ladysmith and other newsworthy places. Many other press photographs, and snapshots taken by participants, appeared in newspapers, and in illustrated books like the British journalist H. W. Wilson's With the Flag to Pretoria (2 vols., 1900-1). The same was true of the Russo-Japanese War, which involved the allies of two major European powers (respectively, France and Britain) and took place in a region of growing interest to the USA. It was recorded by the Japanese Army Photographic Unit, foreign military observers, participants, and photojournalists—on the Russian side most notably by Viktor Bulla and, with the Japanese, many individual professionals, and ‘operators’ for firms like Underwood & Underwood and Collier's Weekly. Protracted episodes like the siege of Port Arthur were extensively photographed. Not only American, Russian, and European newspapers but also Japanese ones like Hochi Shimbun printed countless photographs. Much action, of course, remained unphotographable, and continued to be depicted by graphic artists, some of whom, like J. Matania, would perform the same function in 1914-18.
The First World War
The immense conflict that began in August 1914 generated more photographs than all previous wars put together. They can be roughly categorized under four headings: functional pictures made for operational or administrative purposes; official informational, propaganda, or historical photographs; press pictures; and private images taken by ordinary civilians and service personnel.
Functional photographs were quantitatively the most important. One example was the millions of aerial reconnaissance photographs taken by all the belligerents. Another was military medical photography, which recorded the construction and running of hospitals and the transportation, treatment, and rehabilitation of casualties. A third was identity photography, especially in occupied countries. In October 1915, for example, the German authorities in formerly Russian Poland set out to produce 2 million identity photographs, using 60 photographers and 250 clerks who sometimes achieved an output of 30, 000 pictures a day.
All the major belligerents sponsored official photographs of various aspects of the war, many of which survive in instititutions like Britain's Imperial War Museum (IWM) and France's Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC; formerly Bibliothèque-Musée de la Guerre). Although the organization of official photography varied from country to country, the key objectives everywhere were supplying images to the press, producing propaganda for domestic, neutral, Allied, and enemy consumption, and creating an historical record (especially important, for example, in Australia and Canada). The Germans took energetic action from the beginning, and redoubled their efforts with the creation of the Bild-und Filmamt (BUFA) in 1916. In 1917, the Austro-Hungarian Kriegspressequartier (KPQ) created a photographic unit, which rapidly boosted production and distribution of propaganda photographs. The French Section Photographique de l'Armée was not formed until April 1915, while the British created a succession of bureaucratic bodies, beginning with the Press Bureau and the Propaganda Bureau (Wellington House), which continued to evolve until they were absorbed into the Ministry of Information in February 1918.
Official photographers were generally recruited from the ranks of professionals (nearly half the British ones were from the Daily Mirror), were subject to military supervision in the field, and had their work vetted and censored before distribution to the press and other agencies. Britain devoted a smaller effort to photography than either Germany or France, and coverage was uneven. Of a total of c.30, 000 British photographs, c.20, 000 were taken on the Western Front. The Royal Navy kept official photographers at bay for most of the war, and coverage of other theatres was patchy. Even on the Western Front, apart from the prelude to the Battle of the Somme, which was photographed by Ernest Brooks and three teams from the Royal Engineers, coverage was thin, with never more than a dozen British and Dominion photographers active there 1916-18. Nevertheless, many memorable pictures were taken. Notable also were the series of home front photographs taken by Horace Nicholls and G. P. Lewis in 1917-18.
The illustrated press of belligerent and neutral countries was awash with photographs throughout the war, and initial demand for pictures nearly overwhelmed the official bodies supplying them. Commercial firms like Underwood & Underwood continued to find war pictures to sell to the public; and countless photographs were issued as postcards. However, neither of the world wars, in contrast to many post-1945 conflicts, was covered to any significant extent by free-ranging photojournalists. All major war zones were controlled by the military, and all the photographers working in them—although mostly pressmen—were carefully selected and, as already mentioned, subject to strict supervision. (A possible exception was the American cinematographer Harry Chase, who documented some of T. E. Lawrence's activities in the Middle East; but even he had official approval.) Especially in the early stages of the war, many publications probably used recaptioned—and/or doctored—photographs of peacetime exercises for want of the genuine article. Later, as with the sensational picture of the sinking SMS Blücher (1915), editors paid handsomely for amateur snapshots.
Although many personnel had carried cameras in the Russo- Japanese and Boer wars, the First World War was the first conflict in which private photography took place on a huge scale. Tens of thousands of portable roll-film cameras like the Vest Pocket Kodak were owned and used by servicemen, and the German photographic industry reported increasing demand for materials and cameras until the last year of the war. Despite official prohibitions on both sides, soldiers continued to take pictures, both as souvenirs and, probably, to sell; as a French soldier, André Kahn, wrote in May 1916 about his spectacular front-line pictures, the authorities ‘are hardly going to catch us red-handed here’. (In fact, before the introduction of official photography, the French subverted their own rules by buying up private pictures.) As the war progressed, jaunty images of still-smart soldiers with their comrades and pets gave way to pictures of grim-faced, shabby veterans—looking, in Paul Klee's words, ‘more like slaves than soldiers’—ruins, devastation, and, breaking the ultimate taboo, piles of corpses. Notable among the thousands of surviving private collections are the meticulously annotated albums of a German cavalry officer, Gustav Lachmann, on the Eastern Front in 1915 (IWM), Georges Salles's photographs of the heavily contested village of Soupir in the Aisne, 1915, and M. Boudinhou's photographs of life in the internment camp at Holzminden in 1916-17 (Musée d'Orsay). Finally, there are Käthe Buchler's home front photos of hospitals, war work, and everyday life in Brunswick.
Between the wars
The Russo-Polish War of 1920, the Irish Civil War (1922), the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (1935-6), and the Sino-Japanese War (from 1937) were all recorded by the camera, some by leading photojournalists (for example, Eisenstaedt in Abyssinia, Robert Capa in China); others, like the Irish conflict, by a mixture of amateurs and professionals.
Photographically most significant, however, was the Spanish Civil War (1936-9). Spain was easily accessible from the main European press centres, and the conflict fitted into the larger confrontation between fascism and democracy, with worrying implications especially for France. But there were other reasons for Spain's importance. The first was technical: the availability of small and ‘miniature’ (35 mm) cameras and more sensitive films, and new transmission technology used by organizations like the Associated Press (AP) Wirephoto network inaugurated in January 1935. Secondly, agencies more generally, like AP, Agence Espagne, Alliance Photo, and Trampus, facilitated coverage. Thirdly, the 1930s saw magazine journalism come to full maturity, with venerable papers like the Illustrated London News and Illustration rivalled by newer, more dynamically designed and photo-hungry ones like Vu, Regards, and Match in France, Weekly Illustrated in Britain, and Life (1936) and Look (1937) in the USA. Newspapers like Paris-Soir, L'Intransigeant, the Daily Mail, and the Berliner illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ) also boosted their photo-coverage. There was already a buoyant market for illustrated journalism and, as Life's founder, Henry Luce, had predicted in 1935, ‘A war, any sort of war, is going to be a natural promotion for a picture magazine.’
Certain aspects of Spanish Civil War coverage are particularly notable. In the first place, as Caroline Brothers has argued, editors tended to use photographs in ways that matched their preconceptions about the conflict (and the world in general), with issues like the mobilization of women, the bombing of cities, anticlericalism, and the use of North African troops by the Nationalists particularly susceptible to visual bias. The misleading use of archive photos was also common when first-hand images were lacking and, in general, picture editors often used cropping and selective blow-ups to convey the illusion of close-ups and to skew the impact of pictures. Photojournalists themselves were sometimes cavalier about the dating and captioning of their pictures, and occasionally staged them. Capa was guilty of the first, if not the second, and he was doubtless not the only culprit; the issue of staging persisted into the Second World War. At the same time, legendary figures like Capa—famously described by Picture Post in 1938 as ‘The Greatest War-Photographer in the World’—and Gerda Taro have probably been over-glamorized compared with men like ‘Chim’ Seymour and Hans Namuth, not to mention Spanish photographers (for example, the three Mayo brothers), who took the largest number of photographs and suffered most of the casualties.
This aside, the Spanish Civil War further enhanced the cult, already building in the 1920s, of the daredevil photojournalist, honed the techniques and challenged the ethics of the new illustrated magazines, and thus prepared the ground for the much vaster tasks of 1939-45. It also produced 20th-century war photography's ultimate icon, Capa's controversial Falling Soldier (1936).
The Second World War
As in the previous world conflict, all records were broken. British official photographs alone numbered c.2 million, compared with the 30, 000 of 1914-18. The numbers of still photographs taken by all belligerents for all purposes probably ran into milliards. But information about the organization of all this picture making is patchy, with particularly large gaps in relation to Japan and the USSR. Once again, rough categorization of picture types is useful. First and most numerous were the millions of functional pictures taken by military, naval, and other photographers for purposes ranging from aerial reconnaissance and weapons testing to the illustration of official publications and armed-forces periodicals like the British Parade and American Yank and Leatherneck. Second was the work of photojournalists and other photographers accredited to the armed forces and other official agencies like the British Ministry of Information and the US Office of War Information (OWI). Although their pictures were quantitatively least important, they were crucial in defining the ‘look’ of the war, especially after it was over. The third category comprised pictures taken by amateurs in and out of uniform, and again for reasons that ranged widely, from the purely personal to the illicit and subversive: for example, records of atrocities made by German anti-Nazis, and by resisters and others in occupied countries.
The boundaries between these categories were sometimes fluid, all the more so as, in a war involving mass conscription, many official photographers had been civilian professionals. Many of them also took private pictures, as did some print journalists: for example, the German art historian and naval war correspondent Lothar-Günther Buchheim, who took dramatic U-boat photographs. As in the First World War, some amateur photographs were published in the press. Others, like the snapshots of European locations that the British Admiralty, from June 1941, collected for its Ground Photographic Information library, contributed directly to the war effort. Finally, microphotographed letters (airgraphs)—and, from 1943, photographs—between servicemen and home probably did more for Allied morale than many a propaganda image.
Press photography was differently organized in the democracies than in either the USSR or the Axis countries, although on both sides of the conflict handsomely produced illustrated magazines— Life and Look in the USA, Picture Post in Britain, Signal in occupied Europe, and Nippon, Shashin Shuho (Photo Weekly), and Front in Japan—supplied by top photojournalists were the main vehicles of photographic propaganda. Notwithstanding certain differences in practice between Britain and the USA, including the ranking of American photojournalists as officers and British ones as NCOs, their two systems were broadly similar. Photojournalists of the main magazines, newspapers, and agencies had to be officially accredited, were paid by their civilian employers, housed, transported, and subjected to various controls by the military, and their pictures and captions comprehensively censored. In the USA, all visual material had to be submitted to a pool, although key publications like Life negotiated the right to prevent its own photographers' work being published first in another journal. Washington, London, and Cairo became the main nodal points for Allied war photography, and the bureaucracies that developed there to vet and distribute the flood of incoming pictures often caused rigidities and delays. In theatres like the Pacific, photographers might be thousands of miles from base, communications were tenuous, and it was sometimes weeks or months before pictures appeared in print. Nevertheless, much superb work was done by Western Allied photojournalists, who included some of the most famous names in the business: Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Lee Miller, Carl Mydans, George Rodger, Joe Rosenthal (b. 1911), ‘Chim’ Seymour, W. Eugene Smith, and many others. Russian photographers like Dmitri Baltermants, Yevgeny Khaldei, and Gyorgy Zelma, working in more oppressive conditions, produced equally powerful images.
The total numbers of military and other official photographers deployed were considerable, with combat photographers the tip of a much larger iceberg. Photographic tasks were, as already indicated, multifarious, and their organization a microcosm of the larger military and political cultures of which they were a part. Particularly short-lived and ineffective was the French system, crippled by red tape, lack of resources, and military obsession with security. As all photographs that showed unit numbers on uniforms were banned, the Commissariat of Information's lack of retouching facilities meant that countless pictures were wasted. Administrative delays encouraged neutral papers to fill their pages with German photographs. When, finally, the experienced Jean Prouvost of Paris-Soir took charge in March 1940, he found only seven French military photographers available between Narvik and Beirut. Britain, too, was slow off the mark and plagued by comparable obstacles, although a nucleus of 40 photographers and cinematographers was soon assembled and trained, the advance guard of much larger numbers later on. The small Royal Naval Photographic Branch was supplemented by Admiralty press officers, usually recruited from the ranks of civilian professionals. Official naval and military photographers, and others assigned to home front duties, supplied pictures (uncredited) for a long series of publications issued by the Ministry of Information on military campaigns, armaments production, civil defence, the women's services, and other subjects. The flexibility of the British system—at least where celebrities were concerned—is illustrated by the wartime career of Cecil Beaton, who did home front assignments for the Ministry of Information and worked as an official RAF photographer in the Middle East, India, and China, but also continued to produce private portraits, pictures for Vogue, and an impressive tally of books.
Of all the Allies, the USA was probably best prepared for the conflict. Army photographers, mostly incorporated in the Signal Corps, even received some training from civilian photojournalists. A typical Signals Company had 75 men, of whom 30 were cinematographers and 20 still photographers. Their work was used for a predictably wide range of purposes, from training and intelligence to public relations and the documentation of enemy atrocities. Photographers' numbers increased rapidly during the war, and 100 covered the D-Day landings alone in June 1944. Other military units included the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit famously headed by Edward Steichen, and those of the Marine Corps (including David Douglas Duncan) and USAF. But, again, military operations were only one branch of wartime activity involving photography. Others included shipbuilding and aircraft production, rail transport (documented by Jack Delano and others), medical and rehabilitation services, and the top-secret work of the Manhattan Project. Meanwhile, advertising specialists like Victor Keppler were employed to design war bond posters for the US Treasury.
The best-documented Axis power was Germany, where considerable effort and advance preparation was devoted to visual propaganda. At its centre were the propaganda companies (PKs) set up in 1938, under the operational control of the armed forces (which also used photography for their own functional purposes), but whose output was handled by Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry (By the war's end, control of the PKs had slipped from the hands of the military into those of the SS). Many PK photographers were established photojournalists and the more prominent of them, including Artur Grimm (b. 1909), Hanns Hubmann (1910-96), Walter Frentz (b. 1907), Hilmar Pabel (1910-2000), continued to make credited contributions to papers like the BIZ. During the war the PKs produced 2-3.5 million photographs, many of exceptional quality and some of exceptional horror, like PK 689's coverage of the liquidation of the Warsaw and Łódź ghettoes.
Censorship was strict in all belligerent countries. On the Axis side, and in Stalin's Russia, it was an extension of already authoritarian political systems. In the democracies, however, it was a more complex issue. As in 1914-18, security was a vital consideration, although there continued to be differences of emphasis as between politicians and the military. Another was morale, especially in relation to casualties and setbacks. As the war progressed, a degree of consensus developed between photographers, censors, and editors about the kinds of images that might be acceptable. (Some unacceptable ones were taken anyway, doubtless in the hope that they would be published eventually.) A perennial problem was the depiction of dead Allied servicemen. Dead Americans had been taboo in 1917-18, and remained so until the middle of 1943, when both the head of OWI, Elmer Davis, and President Roosevelt became increasingly concerned about complacency and war-weariness. They also believed, correctly, that the public would accept more hard-hitting pictures. On 2 August 1943, Life was allowed to publish a picture of a soldier killed during the invasion of Sicily, albeit muffled in a blanket. On 20 September George Strock's more explicit Buna Beach photographs appeared, and thenceforth selections of gruesome images from OWI's ‘chamber of horrors’ were released to the press. But taboos about identifiable corpses, serious wounds, and shell-shock remained, and the first published photograph to include a pool of American blood seems to have been Capa's picture of a sniped corporal in Leipzig on 18 April 1945. There were far fewer inhibitions about images of enemy soldiers or civilians, especially Japanese, dead or being killed.
Especially in the early years of the war, amateur photography continued on a considerable scale in Germany and Britain, and throughout the conflict in the USA. British magazines like Amateur Photographer and annuals such as Photograms of the Year continued to appear, and salons and club competitions went on being held, their subject matter (babies, dogs, landscapes, and decorous nudes) indicating an obvious escapist function. More interesting was the activity of German amateurs. In 1939, c.10 per cent of the population owned cameras, and a probably similar proportion of German servicemen took them to war. Materials, including Agfa colour film, were initially plentiful and photography was encouraged as a bridge between soldiers and their families. Albums were manufactured with ‘In Memory of my Military Service’ on the covers and sometimes a Hitler portrait as frontispiece. As in the First World War, surviving collections underline the fact that for many ordinary Germans war was the first opportunity for foreign travel: hence the countless snaps of the Eiffel Tower and the Acropolis. There are also cheery shots of soldiers quaffing local vintages or socializing with friendly civilians. Later, after the invasions of the Balkans and Russia, such images were increasingly replaced by pictures of wrecked equipment, graves, snowdrifts, and, prohibitions notwithstanding, atrocities.
Illicit and resistance photography has increasingly come to light. A selection of underground Dutch photographs, taken between the invasion of Holland and the Liberation, was published in 1995 by Flip Bool and Veronica Hekking. Other collections originated from German servicemen—for example the PK member and anti-Nazi Joe Heydecker—who either systematically recorded the horrors of German occupation policy or at least snapped glimpses of camps like Treblinka from passing troop trains. In Germany itself, clearly for a variety of motives, amateurs in cities like Cologne and Hamburg managed to record the increasingly grim reality of bombing, queues, and deportations. Although regulations about civilian photography were often unclear, the presence of the Gestapo and its informers certainly made taking and processing such pictures seem a risky undertaking. Nevertheless, many have survived. On the home front too, however, practical difficulties were becoming insuperable by 1943; by 1945 photographers were burying their Leicas and Contaxes in the garden in the hope of better times.
Korea
Soon after the war began on 25 June 1950, experienced American and British photojournalists headed for the combat zone; within two months nineteen nations had 270 correspondents and photographers in place. Most notable among the latter were the Americans David Douglas Duncan, Carl Mydans, and Margaret Bourke-White, all on assignment for Life, and the British photographer Bert Hardy sent by Picture Post. Where Second World War photography had been characterized by close military control and strict censorship, Korean War photographers initially enjoyed more freedom. Living and working closely with small military units, they pioneered a new, more intimate style that captured the emotional as well as physical experience of combatants. Hardy's damning photographs of South Korean troops mistreating North Korean prisoners, suppressed just before publication by the owner of Picture Post, did not become publicly known until the 1970s. In contrast, Duncan's close identification with the marines with whom he travelled led to the publication of This is War (1951), a close-up, personal vision of the face of battle. Many Korean War photographers took this new style of war photography into the killing fields of Vietnam.
Vietnam
The Vietnam War (1954-75) was preceded by the unsuccessful war waged by the French in Indo-China between 1946 and 1954. Although of less widespread media interest than Korea, it was heavily photographed by both the French army and photojournalists. Two of the latter, the French photographer Jean Peraud (1923-54) and the American Robert Capa, were killed in 1954. (A year later, the French became embroiled in another colonial conflict, in Algeria (1955-62); among relatively few prominent photographers on the French side were Marc Flament (1929-91), effectively personal photographer of the paratroop leader Colonel Bigeard, and Marc Garanger (b. 1935). )
In Vietnam, more perhaps than in any other war before or since, still photography played a crucial role in documenting the impact of the fighting and informing audiences around the world about it. The conflict coincided with a conjunction of events crucial for war photography: the circulation heyday, then decline, of documentary news magazines such as Life and Look in the USA and Picture Post in Britain; the increasing importance to photojournalism of agencies such as Magnum, Black Star, the AP Wirephoto Service and United Press International (UPI); and the growth of television and its live coverage of news events. Western news photography paralleled the slow escalation (1961-70) and subsequent diminution (1970-3) of US military involvement in Vietnam, described by the historian George C. Herring as ‘America's longest war’.
Television news coverage, which made this a ‘living-room war’ in the USA and Europe, created an enormous paralled commercial demand for still images. In its systematic coverage between 1961 and 1972, Life alone published over 1, 200 photographs from the war zone and another 600 of the American home front, filling more than 1, 000 photo pages, including 38 cover-story photo-essays. Life relied heavily on its lead staff photographers, London-born Larry Burrows and (after 1967) David Douglas Duncan and Co Rentmeester, but also featured the work of wire-service photographers such as Horst Faas and Akihiko Okamura. Photographers from South Vietnam and Cambodia joined photojournalists from the USA, Europe, and Japan, often as freelances hired by the wire services; AP, UPI, and another half-dozen agencies maintained permanent offices in Saigon. Limited by supply shortages, a smaller number of skilled North Vietnamese photographers also covered the war, many for the Vietnam News Agency, often travelling with troops and developing film in makeshift darkrooms in the field. Photographers from both sides sought to influence public opinion; much North Vietnamese photography, for obvious reasons, presents an uncritically supportive view of the country's fight for independence.
In depicting military operations and civilian scenes in Vietnam, Western photojournalists enjoyed unprecedented freedom from censorship. (As in previous conflicts, many US military photographers were also active, working for operational purposes or supplying service journals like Leatherneck.) This freedom, combined with extensive use of colour film and the intimate approach pioneered in Korea, produced a photographic record that was often shockingly immediate and graphic. In a war without front lines, fought in rice fields, mountain jungles, and villages, civilians including women and children were among the casualties depicted with a realism that seemed increasingly horrifying. Photographs of a Saigon monk immolating himself in protest (Malcolm Browne, 1963), of the execution of a Vietcong prisoner in a Saigon street (Eddie Adams, 1968), of the massacre of villagers at My Lai (Ronald Haeberle, 1968), and of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing burning napalm (Nick Ut, 1972) became iconic images. Arguably they had a more profound impact than television footage of the same or similar events. Claims that such coverage turned Americans against the war have been countered by recent scholarship, which suggests that the representation of war's reality articulated the growing opposition rather than causing it. A particularly moving anti-war essay was Vietnam Inc. (1971), by the British photographer Philip Jones Griffiths, which documented four years of the devastation affecting the people and land of Vietnam and got him banned from the country (he later returned to photograph in Cambodia for Magnum).
A few Western photojournalists photographed life in North Vietnam; the British photographer James Cameron (1911-85) and the Italian Romano Cagnoni were the first non-communists admitted to the north in 1965. The American Lee Lockwood did and extended photo-essay on Hanoi for Life in 1967, and the French photographer Marc Riboud was invited to North Vietnam in 1968. Although in a minority on both sides, women photographers worked with distinction in Vietnam. The French photographer Catherine Leroy stayed 1966-8 and survived to cover equally harrowing struggles in the Lebanon in the 1970s. The American Dickey Chapelle (1918-65), whose career had begun in the Second World War, won awards for her Vietnam coverage before being killed. In total, more than 135 photographers went missing or died in Vietnam, of whom perhaps the most famous was Larry Burrows.
After Vietnam
Since the 1970s, photographers have covered many conflicts, in widely varying conditions. (A fundamental precondition is the degree of media interest in a given theatre: Iraq, for example, compared with the Sudan or Mauritania; photojournalists do not risk their lives for unsaleable pictures.) Examples have included wars fought by regular forces (the Falklands, 1982; Iraq, 1991 and 2003); civil wars involving government forces, guerrillas, and militias (the Lebanon and Nicaragua in the 1970s; Sri Lanka since 1983; Chechnya, the Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire in the 1990s); the disintegration of states (Yugoslavia since 1991); and localized but often ultra-violent communal conflicts within states (Northern Ireland since the 1970s, South Africa in the early 1990s, Indonesia since 1998). In a category by themselves, finally, though related to many of these struggles, have been the 21st-century terror campaigns triggered by the events of 11 September 2001. A leading member of the post-Vietnam generation, James Nachtwey, who nearly died in the collapse of the World Trade Center, was by this time a veteran of Croatia, Guatemala, Indonesia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, the Palestine intifada, Rwanda, South African township violence, and Sri Lanka.
On every assignment the photographer needs shelter, sustenance, transportation, support for complex equipment, opportunities to take pictures, and the means to get them home. In different theatres, however, he or she may have more or less freedom of movement and access to the fighting, and security, back-up, and information may be abundant or scarce. In the Falklands, for example, the media faced a situation reminiscent of the First World War: a tightly controlled war zone, with access granted to only a handful of ‘acceptable’ journalists, and rigorous censorship. (The Royal Navy's traditional distrust of the press was compounded by post-Vietnam anxiety about the effect of ‘negative’ images.) Unsurprisingly, most British pictures were by military and naval photographers. In the 1991 Gulf War, photographers were subjected to rigorous pooling and censorship arrangements, and their numbers—in theory—also strictly controlled. But at the opposite extreme, in conditions of anarchy and civil war, a free-for-all may prevail, with photographers enjoying considerable liberty but dependent on their own resources and often dangerously exposed. The exploits of Don McCullin, Catherine Leroy, and Raymond Depardon in the Lebanon, Susan Meiselas in Nicaragua, and Nachtwey in Sri Lanka are paradigmatic; as are those of the ‘Bang-Bang Club’ photographers (Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroeck, and Joao Silva) in South African townships like Thokoza, Soweto, and Sebokeng. In such situations the photographer must capture strong and meaningful pictures, avoid being intimidated or manipulated into creating propaganda, and stay alive.
War photography is, obviously, a high-risk occupation. Mines, snipers, ‘friendly fire’, road and helicopter accidents, abduction, and torture are among the physical hazards. The psychological ones range from burn-out to long-term depression. Of the Bang-Bang Club four, Oosterbroeck was killed in action, Marinovich was seriously wounded, and Carter committed suicide. McCullin has spoken frequently of the stress caused by recording unimaginably harrowing scenes. Of a picture of a dead Vietcong and his scattered possessions, he has said: ‘I have a conscience about photographing these people [dead soldiers and their families], intruding on their grief, walking away with images of their grief. Don't think it's been easy to live with that, because it hasn't.’ Yet recruits keep coming. The French photographer Patrick Chauvel's (b. 1949) description of his baptism of fire in the Six-Day War (1967) speaks volumes:
I saw lots of things, but I couldn't translate. I just knew I felt incredibly good when I was there. The action was very quick and very big. The heavier the fighting, the more I could feel—even why I had fingers. Everything came into place. My eyes could see what I needed them to see; I could hear, and I needed to hear fast; I could run fast, walk fast; I wasn't tired, hungry, or thirsty. I felt so alive. Everything existed. (P. Howe, Shooting under Fire, 2002)
Ever since Picture Post's 1938 tribute to Capa the job has been heavily glamorized. A 1985 French magazine article on war photographers carried the strap-line ‘Twenty years old; the most gorgeous babes; danger, the world's strongest drug; pals. And they even want to pay you.’ Two years earlier, the Hollywood feature film Under Fire, set in Central America, had built a thrilling and romantic story around Nick Nolte as a go-anywhere, relationship-hopping, Nikon-toting lensman. More significantly, perhaps, Christian Frei's 2002 documentary about Nachtwey, War Photographer, constructed a heroically focused and disciplined, almost monastic figure dedicated to exploring the world's dark places.
The 21st century will inevitably bring further advances in both automated military technology and the ability to capture images with remote-controlled devices. Computer-generated pictures will probably play an increasing part in the reporting and analysis of conflict. However, there is no sign that the public's appetite for graphic, up-close images of war and its consequences, obtained by photographers at ground level, will abate.
— Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- McCullin, D., Unreasonable Behaviour: An Autobiography (1990).
- Peress, G., The Silence (1994).
- Ristelhueber, S., Beyrouth photographies (1994).
- Marinovich, G., and Silva, J., The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War (2000).
- Howe, P., Shooting under Fire: The World of the War Photographer (2002).
- Holzer, A. (ed.), Mit der Kamera bewaffnet. Krieg und Fotografie (2003)
