tographers. The American photographer, W. Eugene
Smith epitomizes the figure of the World War II
photographerasbravehumanist.Whileotheraccom-
plished photographers in the European and Pacific
theatres made clear, empathic records of events
(notably the British photographers Burt Hardy, Bill
Brandt, and George Rodger; the Americans Lee
Miller, Constance Stuart Larrabee, George Strock,
PeterStackpole,andCarlMydans),Smithattempted,
in his own words, ‘‘to call out as teacher and surgeon
and entertainer’’ an ‘‘indictment of war.’’ In his
photographs at sea and at the Pacific battles on
Guam, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Tinian, and Okinawa,
where he was seriously wounded, Smith undertakes
a disciplined observational practice that resolves bit-
ter, highly geographically focusedbattles into muscu-
lar statements, and that assiduously locates moments
of tenderness in the midst of brutality. A master of
design, he renders appallingly bloody events with a
certain demanding elegance, unleashing the sensory
totality of battle under the sign of the symphonic.
By contrast, Robert Capa may be credited with
an alternate form of engaged war photography.
Capa began his career during the Spanish Civil
War as a partisan freelancer, a roaming photogra-
pher working to publicize the Loyalist resistance to
fascism. Publishing inVu,Life, and other period-
icals, Capa became famous for his bravery and e ́lan,
and his photographs for their frankness and pas-
sion. In perhaps the most famous war photograph
in history, Capa’s 1936 ‘‘The Falling Soldier,’’
shows a Spanish Republican militiaman, Federico
Borrell Garcı ́a at the moment of his death, falling
backward from the impact of a bullet at Cerro
Muriano on the Co ́rdoba front. Debate over the
picture’s authenticity has long accompanied its
notoriety (largely a baseless debate: soldiers agree-
ing to stage their own deaths as a publicity stunt
would have been patently stupid and self-defeating),
but the photograph’s deeper accomplishment is the
way it handles death as both fact and enigma. If
Capa’s pictures as they appeared during his lifetime
reveal him to be a trenchant spot news photogra-
pher, the volumes of his work published since his
death in 1954 reveal him to be a photographer of
remarkable depth. These later books are not hon-
orific compilations, but essential to an understand-
ing of Capa’s vision in North Africa, Sicily, Italy,
the Normandy invasion, France and Belgium during
the Second World War, later in Israel, and in Indo-
china. Specifically, they show the ways that Capa in
fact resists the idiom of the totemic, iconic image,
instead picturing war as an encompassing but dis-
aggregated phenomenon, an opaque commitment
spread between soldier and civilian, a destructive
force to be approached multiple times, in multiple
passes. His photographs place the viewer ‘‘beside
war,’’ in John Steinbeck’s able phrase, registering
and testing its emotional reality.
On all fronts, the Second World War legitimated
the targeting of civilians and the ruination of cities
to an unprecedented degree, and indeed, victory
came to depend on the destruction of civilian life.
The empathic photoreportorial mode lent itself
naturally to a number of projects concentrating
on the effect of the fighting on civilian populations,
undeniably compassionate projects that, at the
same time, fell short of exposing the universal lies
about civilian casualties: namely that the targeting
of civilians is always perpetrated as the crime of the
‘‘other’’ side, and that such damage is not central to
military objectives. In August 1944,Lifepublished
pictures by the German-born American photogra-
pher, Alfred Eisenstadt on the plight of Jewish
refugees, and in October 1945, published Leonard
McComb’s sympathetic photographs of displaced
Germans. The Swiss photographer Werner Bischof
extensively photographed postwar Germany for
European and American magazines, while the Am-
erican photographer, John Vachon photographed
postwar Poland under the sponsorship of the Uni-
ted Nations. The American photographer, The ́re`se
Bonney’s 1940 work,War Comes to the People: The
First Camera Record Ever Made of the Death of
Peaceremains an inventive, ambitious look at the
civilian effort to cope with the war in Finland and
France (that is, on both sides of the Allied-Axis
split, a divide the book does not recognize),
while her 1943 book on orphans and children refu-
gees, Europe’s Children anticipates David Sey-
mour’s 1949Children of Europe. Seymour, joining
with Capa, Rodger, and the French photographer,
Henri Cartier-Bresson, founded Magnum Photos
in 1947, which remains the most prestigious photo-
graphic agency dedicated to humanistic reportage
that treats war and peace as a single, interdepen-
dent subject.
Soviet photographers of the Second World War
have been considerably less well known outside of
the former Soviet Union. The important work of
photographers on the grueling battlefields of the
Russian front was virtually unpublished in the
West until after the Cold War: Dmitri Baltermants,
Mikhail Trakhman, Max Alpert, Galina Sankova,
Olga Lander, Emanuel Evzerikhin, Mark Markov-
Grinberg, as well as Boris Kudoyarov’s pictures
of the siege of Leningrad, and Georgi Zelma’s
of Stalingrad. Most of these photographers remain
obscure in the west, with the exception of the Rus-
sian-Jewish photographer, Yevgeny Khaldei, whoseWAR PHOTOGRAPHY