photographs of war are imperfect analogues of their
constitutive elements: the physical world of war itself,
individual photographers’ perceptions, and the insti-
tutional and discursive practices in which photo-
graphs are enmeshed from their origin, and on
which they depend for their meanings. A critical
examination demands at least three discrete, simulta-
neous lines of inquiry: first, to determine what photo-
graphs were actually made of any given war, by
whom and under what circumstances; second, to spe-
cify which of these were published and circulated
contemporaneously, and in what forms; third, to
delineate the ways that photographs subsequently
appeared or disappeared from public view, in what
contexts and with what impact.
Building on improvements in camera technologies
and the development of the halftone reproduction
process, by the turn of the twentieth century photo-
graphy was ascendant as a journalistic aid, illustrat-
ing news of the Spanish American War (1898), the
Anglo-Boer war (1899–1902), the Russo-Japanese
War (1904–1905), and other wars of empire. The
sustained use of photographs as visual media
began in earnest during the First World War
(1914–1918), with photography cautiously but con-
certedly integrated into the war effort, both for
military purposes and to discipline public opinion.
From the outset, Allied military officials considered
a free press a security risk, and photographs of the
war were subject to direct military censorship.
Civilian journalists, including photographers, were
banned from the Western Front, the pivotal conflict
area, and official photographers were exceedingly
few: the British government, for example, accredited
only two between 1916–1918, Ernest Brooks and
John Warwick Brooke.
Nonetheless, several illustrated publications brought
photographs of the conflict to the public more or
less as it happened: in BritainThe Daily Mirror,The
Illustrated London News,The Sphere, The Daily
Graphic, andThe War Illustrated; in FranceExcel-
sior,Le Miroir, andL’Illustration; in the United
StatesThe New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial,
Collier’s Weekly,Leslie’s Weekly; in GermanyDas
Illustrierte Blatt, theBerliner Illustrierte Zeitung,
and theIllustrierte Kriegs-Zeitung. The majority of
pictures in these publications show war materiel,
the landscape of the battlefields, damaged property
and ruins, troop formations, posed and candid
imagesofsoldiersandofficersatrest,andthe
provision of medical care. Illustrated battlefield
tour guides appeared as early as 1916 in virtually
every European country. The tasks with which
these photographs were charged have remained
central imperatives of war photography ever since:
to solicit public support without unduly registering
war’s contradictions, and to validate the state’s in-
sistent appeal to duty and service while mitigating
war’s ugliness.
Altogether, comparatively few of the illustrated
periodicals’ photographs depict the staggering
human costs of a war that ‘‘used up words,’’ in
Henry James’ phrase, or its signature elements: the
waves of soldiers going ‘‘over the top’’ only to be
mowed down by automatic weapons, the extensive
use of poison gasses, the heavy toll of cholera, ty-
phoid, dysentery, and other diseases, and the psy-
chological stress of long contests of attrition and
endurance in stinking, pestilence ridden trenches.
At the battles of Passchendaele in 1917 and Arras in
1918, the official Canadian photographer, William
Rider-Rider photographed lone soldiers in non-
descript landscapes, suggesting the arduousness, if
not the gruesomeness of their experience. At the
battle of the Somme, the most intensively photo-
graphed battle of the war, Brooks and the British
Royal Engineers photographed the forward trench
preparations, the great mine explosions prior to the
initial assault on July 1, 1916, and the first waves of
troops going forward. Their photographs, how-
ever, failed to depict what was eventually recog-
nized as one of the worst debacles of the war:
60,000 dead in the first day and 30,000 in the first
half hour alone, and 1.3 million by October 1916.
Likewise, inCollier’s Photographic History of the
European War, a lavish book of photographs pub-
lished in 1917 to rally American public support as
the United States entered the conflict, only 9 of 376
photographs show dead soldiers in any form, most
of these distanced views of corpses in large battle-
field expanses. Viewers of this book would not
guess the war’s unprecedented carnage, with com-
bined military casualties by 1918 totaling more
than 37 million, some 57% of all mobilized forces.
Exceptions to the omissions in official photogra-
phy of the war do exist, most importantly the
photographs of anonymous officers and soldiers
who carried private cameras despite the press pro-
hibitions, for example, British Private F.A. Fyfe,
French soldier Marcel Felser, Australian Captain
Charles Bean, who photographed the 1915 Battle
of Gallipoli, and the soldiers in the London Rifle
Brigade stationed near Armentie`res, France, who
photographed the December 1914 Christmas truce
in which soldiers from both sides fraternized in no
man’s land. A once influential, now obscure
reclaiming of the war’s photographs is Ernst Frie-
drich’s 1924 anti-war invective,Krieg dem Krieg!
(War against War!), presenting nearly 200 photo-
graphs from German archives, many previouslyWAR PHOTOGRAPHY