war photographers

war photographers and ciné cameramen of both sides, like war correspondents with whom they often worked closely, recorded just about every aspect of the war.

Roger Fenton, Queen Victoria's court photographer, was the first war photographer when he covered the Crimean War (1854–6). ‘No dead bodies,’ were his instructions from Prince Albert, a principle official censorship followed about American casualties during the Second World War until a photograph of three dead US soldiers on a beach at Buna was released by Life magazine in September 1943. But Axis censorship was more rigorous than that of the Allies. As an extreme example, when a Japanese newsreel cameraman recorded the Japanese Navy's defeat at Midway, his film was confiscated and he was kept in virtual isolation for the rest of the war.

Both military and civilian photographers were employed by both sides. German photographers and cameramen were recruited into the Propaganda Ministry's PK units (Propaganda-Kompagnien) which also contained war correspondents. The British used civilian photographers, who wore uniform and were attached to all three services, and in October 1941 the Army Film and Photographic Unit was formed for Army Film Unit personnel and civilian official photographers. US service photographers and cameramen were mostly part of the US Signals Corps; the US Navy had its own group of photographers, organized by the fashion photographer Edward Steichen.

Most US civilian photographers came from Associated Press, Acme Newspictures, International News Photos, and Life magazine. There were no exclusives: they pooled all photographs. Life had 21 war photographers, including Margaret Bourke-White, whose photographs of Moscow under attack in 1941 went round the world, and Robert Capa, famous for his Spanish Civil War photograph of a Republican infantryman being struck by a bullet. Capa was one of the first ashore during the Normandy landings (see OVERLORD). ‘If your pictures aren't good enough,’ he would say, ‘you aren't close enough.’ To be close enough, war photographers took enormous risks. By July 1941 fifteen stills photographers from German PK companies had been killed, and during the course of the war 37 US photographers lost their lives and 112 were wounded.

Some photographers, such as Capa, became famous with just one shot. The picture of the Stars and Stripes being raised over Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi made photographer Joe Rosenthal a household name after the war. The fact that, like MacArthur wading ashore, it was a posed shot and that a much smaller flag had been raised—and photographed by Sgt Louis Lowery—three hours earlier while fighting was still continuing on the mountain, did not detract from its universal appeal. Others became well known for their photographic record on the Home Front. Heinrich Hoffman, Hitler's personal photographer, helped to create the cult that surrounded the Führer by producing images of a leader at one with his people, while Bill Brandt's name will always be associated with his photographs of sleeping Londoners who had taken night-time refuge from the Blitz in the underground and elsewhere.

Some wartime photographs were taken in unusual, or terrible, circumstances, or for unusual reasons. Johannese Lange, a German photographer who lived near Colditz, was ordered to record life there and the means and methods used by prisoners-of-war to escape; an Australian soldier, George Aspinall, not only managed to take photographs in Changi prison and of scenes on the Burma–Thailand railway, but was able to process them with chemicals smuggled in to him; and Matsushige Yoshito, a civilian press photographer, was in a suburb of Hiroshima when the first atomic bomb was detonated above the town. His pictures of the devastation—just five negatives survived radioactive contamination—were taken only hours after the city's destruction, a unique record. He never accepted any money for their use. ‘It is enough,’ he said, ‘that their publication helps to make a second Hiroshima out of the question.’

Bibliography

Fabian, R., and and Adam, H. , Images of War (New York, 1985).
Moeller, S. , Shooting War (New York, 1989).
Roeder, G. , The Censored War (New Haven, 1993).