Sarah King - Standing on the shoulders of giants
- Alex James
- Oct 30, 2016
- 6 min read
Juliette Binoche in A Thousand Times Goodnight
For as long as there have been cameras, there has been a fascination with capturing moments in time and wars are no different.
The earliest attributable photographs were taken by a British military surgeon, John McCosh who documented the Anglo-Sikh war (1848-9) and later the Second Anglo-Burmese war (1852-3).
Roger Fenton was the first official war photographer for the British Army and was appointed for the Crimean War in 1854. Like official photographers today, his remit was to show the might but also dignity of the British Forces. The gritty reporting that we’ve come to expect as the hallmark of the war photographer had to wait for the partnership of James Robertson and Felice Beato.
They took over from Fenton in 1855 and in February 1858, they arrived in Calcutta to document the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. During this time, they produced possibly the first-ever photographic images of corpses.
In 1860, Beato teamed up with Charles Wirgman, a correspondent for The Illustrated London News, to document the Anglo-French campaign during the Second Opium War. They accompanied the attack force travelling north to the Taku Forts and the photographs were the first to document a military campaign as it unfolded, marking the beginning of the genre as we know it today.
Every conflict since then has been photographed by brave people, prepared to risk their lives to capture the truth, but it may come as a surprise to know that the first female war photographers were working as far back as WWI.
There were three: Christina Broom, Olive Edis and Florence Farmborough.
Broom worked primarily in London as a freelance photographer from 1903 until her death in 1939. Now recognised as the first woman to style herself as a press photographer, she submitted photographs, most notably of the Suffragette movement, to picture agencies for publication in magazines and national newspapers.
In 1904, an assignment with the Scots Guards resulted in her appointment as official photographer to the Brigade of Guards and Household Cavalry. This unprecedented accolade, sanctioned by King Edward VII, gave Broom unique access to these regiments, regarded as the elite of the British Army, at their London headquarters during the war. She documented ceremonies, preparations for the war and one of her most famous photographs was of Armistice Day outside Buckingham Palace.
However, she never worked at the front. In August 1914, the British military authorities made it clear that neither women nor photographers were welcome in the war zone.
In 1918, the Imperial War Museum sought permission for Olive Edis to visit the Western Front on its behalf. They encountered much resistance but eventually, in 1919, she was allowed to do so and spent four weeks photographing British, French and American women attached to the armed forces in a variety of locations.
Edis was determined to show the role that women played and her photographs show them in positions of responsibility, dominance or skill and in a broad range of roles. Although men occasionally feature, they rarely appear in large numbers and almost never in positions of equality.
There was one women who succeeded in being there at the sharp end and that was Florence Farmborough. She was British by birth but she had a thirst for travel and adventure and by the time war broke out, she was working in Moscow as an English teacher.
She trained as a Red Cross nurse and in March 1915, joined a Russian mobile medical post close to the front line on the Eastern Front. She was already a keen amateur photographer and she set about documenting the people she encountered and the vagaries of war on the Eastern Front as she perceived them.
Her proximity to the front enabled her to access trenches and troops in the front line. She photographed the dead of both sides in graphic detail, while also documenting the pragmatism and respect which Russians soldiers accorded their dead.
These trail-blazers led the way for some of the greatest photographers of the 20th and 21st Century.
Margaret Bourke-White (1904 – 1971)
Bourke-White was the first female war correspondent and the first woman to be allowed to work in combat zones during World War II. In 1941, she travelled to the Soviet Union just as Germany broke its pact of non-aggression. She was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when German forces invaded.
As the war progressed, she was attached to the U.S. Army Air Force in North Africa, then to the U.S. Army in Italy and later in Germany. She repeatedly came under fire in Italy in areas of fierce fighting.
In the spring of 1945, she travelled throughout a collapsing Germany with Gen. George S. Patton. She arrived at Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp, and after the war, she produced a book entitled, Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, a project that helped her come to grips with the brutality she had witnessed during and after the war.
She was one of the foremost documenters of violence that erupted at the independence and partition of India and Pakistan and interviewed and photographed Mohandas K. Gandhi just a few hours before his assassination in 1948.
Lee Miller: (1907 – 1977)
Miller was born in New York and made her name as a model and then fashion photographer.
At the outbreak of World War II, Miller was living in Hampstead in London when the bombing of the city began. Ignoring pleas from friends and family to return to the US, Miller embarked on a new career in photojournalism as the official war photographer for Vogue, documenting the Blitz.
In 1942 she was accredited into the U.S. Army as a war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications and travelled to France less than a month after D-Day, recorded the first use of napalm at the siege of St. Malo, as well as the liberation of Paris, the battle for Alsace, and the horror of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.
After the war, she returned to her previous work of fashion photography but was suffering from what was diagnosed as Clinical Depression, but what we now recognise as PTSD. She retired to the country and did the occasional shoot for Vogue but the war had broken her and she eventually turned her back on photography.
Dickey Chapelle (1919 – 1965)
Born in Wisconsin, from an early age it was clear that Dickey was an adventurer. She dreamed of being a pilot but eventually settled for working as a photographer sponsored by Trans World Airlines working out of New York.
During World War II she secured a contract with National Geographic as a war photojournalist and with one of her first assignments, was posted with the Marines during the battle of Iwo Jima. She also covered the battle of Okinawa.
Having caught the bug, when the war ended she travelled the globe in search of conflicts to document including the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, where she was captured and jailed for over seven weeks. She later learned to jump with paratroopers, and usually travelled with troops. This led to frequent awards, and earned the respect of both the military and journalistic community.
During the Vietnam War, she was embedded with the US Marines, documenting the action first hand.
On November 4, 1965 while on patrol with a Marine platoon during a search and destroy operation 16 km south of Chu Lai, Quang Ngai Province, the lieutenant in front of her kicked a tripwire boobytrap. Chapelle was hit in the neck by a piece of shrapnel which severed her carotid artery and she died soon after.
Her body was repatriated with an honour guard consisting of six Marines, and she was given full Marine burial. She became the first female war correspondent to be killed in Vietnam, as well as the first American female reporter to be killed in action.
Today, we are blessed with many female war photographers – some of which have given they lives to document the truth of conflict.
They are almost too numerous to mention but what they all share is courage, passion and a determination that put many of their male counterparts to shame.
Here are just a few of them (click on their name to read more):
