censored by the military. In sequences of careful
pictorial juxtapositions and short, impassioned
texts, the book takes the viewer on a relentless
tour of slaughter and ruin, culminating in a series
of close-ups of veterans’ horrific facial wounds.
The principal uses of photography during the
Second World War issued from those of the First
World War, supplemented by an expanded practice
of the photo-reporter developed in the Spanish Civil
War (1936–1939), particularly in the work of the
Hungarian-born American photographer, Robert
Capa, and the Polish-born photographer, David
Seymour (‘‘Chim’’). The Second World War, which
effectively began with Japan’s invasion of China in
1937, followed by Germany’s invasion of Poland in
1939, engulfed the planet by its conclusion in 1945,
comprising diverse theatres of conflict across the
globe and a vast spectrum of participants. On all
sides the conflict saw a massively expanded official
use of photography, with photographers thoroughly
harnessed to the prosecution of the war, both as a
part of the armed forces themselves and as civilians
integrated into the military. As disseminated in
newspapers and especially the picture magazines
that had proliferated in the interwar years, photo-
graphs became a primary and uniquely powerful
form of media widely recognized as crucial to the
war effort. ‘‘Fundamentally,’’ stated the American
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, ‘‘public opinion
wins wars.’’ Building on innovations in design and
graphic arts in the interwar period, particularly in
Germany, by the outbreak of the war, the picture
magazines had developed a sophisticated use of the
visual page that proved highly effective as public
relations—dynamic layouts, active narrative associa-
tions between pictures of varying types and sizes,
potent picture-text combinations, an enticing inter-
play of visual sequences, montages, and symbols.
Neither the term ‘‘news’’ nor ‘‘propaganda’’ on its
own quite describes the visual experience of the war
in the pages of the FrenchVu,Regards,andParis-
Soir,theBritishPicture Post,Match, and theIllu-
strated London News, the AmericanLifeandLook,
and theBerliner Illustrierte Zeitungand the Illu-
strierte Beobachter: propaganda infused with the
timeliness and urgency of news, and news girded by
propaganda’s certainty and sense of destiny.
Lifemagazine, to consider one example, had by
the 1941 American entry into the war, arrived at a
potent combination of an oversized format, a lively
layout, an abundant use of pictures, and an upbeat
integration of advertising, feature stories, and
news—all war news having been cleared by military
censors. Within the picture magazine idiom,Life’s
photographic presentation of the war effectively
adapted the form of empathic ‘‘documentary’’
photography ascendant in the 1930s (associated in
the United States with government sponsored
photography of the Great Depression by the Reset-
tlement Administration/Farm Security Administra-
tion), and so succeeded in positioning sacrifice and
tribulation within the rhetoric of moral activism on
the part of the American state.Life’s photographs
glamorized the war partly by rendering it hale, vital,
and seductive—following the lead of the influential
Nazi propaganda magazine,Signal—and partly by
harnessing the prestige of the emergent practice of
concerned photojournalism to the goals of the
Allied war effort. TypicallyLife’s photographic
spreads on the war included a modicum of
ground-level combat photographs (often shot at
middle distance), together with candid photographs
of soldiers, officers, and periodically impacted civi-
lians, healthy doses of aerial pictures, battle land-
scapes and seascapes, maps, and occasionally
drawings and pictures of scale models of battle.
The effectiveness of this approach required com-
paratively limited photographic coverage of the
war: only about 10% of a typical weekly edition
offered reportorial photographs of the war in any
form, while another 15% of the magazine referred to
the war in advertisements. Altogether,Life’s por-
trayal of the war was more a matter of ethos than
information: it exuded the war more than ‘‘covered’’
it, and so naturalized its presence in American life.
In subsequent decades, much of the material
originally published inLifewas reorganized and
republished. Stripping the photographs of the
idiom of the periodical, and securing their place
as the images of the victors, later books present
more concentrated (and so seemingly more exhaus-
tive) representation of the war, and particularly of
battle—from the invasion of Poland and the occu-
pation of Europe to the war in the North African
desert, the Russian front, the great battles in the
Pacific, the invasion of Normandy, and the libera-
tion of Europe from the west and the east. The
recombinant archive of World War II pictures
helped to fix the central conceits of combat photo-
graphy: the viewer, distanced in place and time
from the fighting, is brought vicariously into the
contingencies of battle, given to feel its excitement
but not quite its danger, and offered valor as the
face of justice. In time, the aggregation of recir-
culated ex-magazine photographs have become
nearly co-extensive with the image of the war itself:
what began as publicity has been transformed into
popular memory.
Subsequent publications also emphasized the
auteurship of individual Second World War pho-WAR PHOTOGRAPHY