World War II, a host of talented press photogra-
phers made memorable images of Blitz damage,
including George Rodger, one of Magnum’s foun-
ders. Powerful pictures of the human cost of war
were made by the Soviet photographer, Dmitri Bal-
termants. Lee Miller, a former assistant to and
model for Man Ray, accompanied American forces
and produced startling pictures of the liberation of
the German concentration camps. David Douglas
Duncan photographed the war in Korea. Don
McCullin and Larry Burrows made graphic pic-
tures of the wounded in Viet Nam in the 1960s.
War photographs assumed the power to change
public opinion. Thus, governments have exerted
control over their publication.
Fashion Photography and Portraiture
Although nineteenth-century photographers made
images of fashionably dressed sitters, fashion
photography was not a distinct genre. Because
photographs could now be published, because of
sophisticated retail strategies, and because the
motion picture industry used photographs to sus-
tain interest in its stars, fashion photographers
became important in the 1920s and 1930s. De-
signers, magazines, and department stores all
depended on them. Baron Adolph de Meyer, a
Pictorialist, made images of aristocratic beauties,
as did George Hoyningen-Huene, while Edward
Steichen made unforgettable images of Hollywood
stars and cultural figures. Man Ray produced Sur-
realist-inflected fashion photographs in the 1930s.
In England, Cecil Beaton came to represent the
very ideal of the urbane fashion photographer.
Several portraitists became renowned for their
perceived ability to capture the personalities of
their sitters. In the first half of the century, Steichen,
Beaton, Yousef Karsh, and Gise`le Freund docu-
mented important sitters. Phillip Halsman, Irving
Penn, Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Herb Ritts,
and Annie Leibovitz have done the same in later
decades, their works straddling the border between
rote documents and artworks. Pictures by these
photographers were most often collected in books,
which might be seen as a continuation of the nine-
teenth-century predilection for compiling images of
famous sitters. Since the 1970s, the portrait tradi-
tion has been ironized by the witty photographs of
William Wegman, who photographed his pet dog in
situations formerly reserved for serious portraiture.
Science and Technology
Twentieth-century scientists and photographers
were interested in capturing motion in ever-smaller
increments. Eadweard Muybridge and Jules Larey
had been pioneers in the previous century. With
the development of super-quick shutters and film,
scientists such as Harold Edgerton amazed viewers
with images of bullets captured in mid-trajectory
and the beautiful symmetries of water droplets.
X-rays, aerial photography and astronomical pho-
tography, and infrared photography were also
refined in this period, as was the ability to photo-
graph images seen through electron microscopes. In
general, as it had in the past, photography proved
to be an indispensable tool of modern science. Con-
currently, older forms of the medium, such as the
tintype and the stereograph, disappeared.
As the twentieth century drew to a close, and with
the dawning of the technological era, photographs
were breaking free of the traditional camera and
darkroom altogether. Digital photography, the tran-
scription of the subject directly to disc or drive, was
theresultofamarriagewithcomputers.Bythe
1980s, scanners and software had been developed to
store and convincingly alter pictures, thereby calling
into question the inherent veracity of the pho-
tograph. The abandonment of any traditional devel-
oping, the meaninglessness of a photographic
‘‘original,’’ and the ease with which digital imagery
is transmitted through Internet systems has irrevoc-
ably changed the fundamental nature of the medium.Color
Color photography matured in the twentieth cen-
tury. Previously, color in photographs—outside of
the singular and isolated experiments of isolated
inventors—was achieved by the actual application
of colored pigments to the photograph’s surface.
The first practical color process was the Auto-
chrome process, invented in 1907 by the French
Lumie`re brothers (Auguste and Louis). It produced
a positive color transparency, not a print on paper,
by using a color screen, actually a glass plate cov-
ered in dyed starches, through which light registered
colors on a layer of emulsion. Alfred Stieglitz, John
Cimon Warburg (1867–1931), and Jacques Larti-
gue all made autochromes. However, the process
was expensive, ephemeral, produced unique exam-
ples, and did not encourage experimentation.HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TWENTIETH-CENTURY DEVELOPMENTS