Photography & Conflict

• Conflict is a broader term than war (Berger - agony)
• Handout - John Berger
• Image by Don McCullin - Black & White - Black Blood
• Not truthful because its B&W
• "I only use the camera like I use a toothbrush, it does the job" (Cited in Wells L, 2003:289)
• When was technology available to record agony?
• Susan Sontag - Regarding the pain of others
• Photography shows what war does - mutilation and ruin
• American/Mexican War, newspapers - "show me don't tell me"
• Early conflict photography was "staged" because camera speed too slow
• Daguerreotype - "General Wool & Staff" was long exposure
• We don't see active warfare, we see staging or we see the aftermath
• Roger Fenton: "The Valley of the Shadow of Death" (1855)
• Photographers often have famous artists in their heads when they stage images
• Fenton's work reported back an oppositional image (imotive) and not the "official" image
• Canonball offers a terrible suggestion but does not show the war itself
• James Robertson was far more explicit (1856)
• Alexander Gardner, strewn dead bodies (1863) - horror and reality, political point, making a point that previous photography was putting a veil over the truth
• William Rider: Passchendaele (1917) first major conflict where newspapers could reproduce images easily at relatively good quality. 
• No longer Kings Shilling, no longer elitist
• Images start to be censored by government
• Press works with government (self-censorship)
• Press do not want censorship so they show what they can
• Could not show dead soldiers in Britain
• Public didn't really see the soldiers experience of war
• Technology still not great
• Battles were in trenches so photography very difficult
• Night photography almost impossible
• Ernst Friedrich "War Against War" (1928) Compilation of images by other photographers
• Sontag - shock therapy, drawn from German archives
• The face of war, facial injuries. Book banned ten years later
• "The Fallen" by unknown photographer/soldier
• We start to see that those taking part in the war are taking the photographs
• Robert Capa: D-Day Landing (1944) Taking images of the battle itself
• Henri Cartier-Bresson - POW - Leica
• Eugene Smith - WWII
• Lee Miller: Buchenwald (1945) Conflict shown through subtle images and not metaphor
• Lee Miller gives official version
• Sontag - non polished images are welcomed - "I've got to show them"
• Larry Burrows: Vietnam (1966) No heroes, complex and contradictory
• Burrows lost Capa's photos in lab
• Images are now placed on the internet, leaked images, we all feel complicit
• Don McCullin now takes landscapes - Antithesis
• Inherrent contradiction
• What is the photographers aim? Strike concern in the viewer
• Aim was to politicise us into action
• Berger - photography of war doesn't affect human behavoir
• Tyler Hicks - triptych made front page of New York Times
• Sontag - What are we not seeing if we are seeing this?