Images of war

War photography can be a very intimate exposure to horrors that those on the front line of a battle experience. Though we are sitting comfortably in our sitting rooms at home, we can be transported through these images to the war zone, and it can open our eyes to the reality of what war is really like. War photography is as essential as ever. The moving tributes about Tim Hetherington, the photographer recently killed in Libya, consolidates the notion that it images are often the best way to communicate with the public, to show the truth about what is being experienced. Take for example his photo of a soldier during the Liberian war:

It is an image that resonates more powerfully than most words could do, and it is thanks to images like this that we can start to get some semblance of what is going on in countries far away.

Whilst photography had been around for many years prior to 1914, the Great War saw a great expansion in the number of those who put themselves in the line of fire to expose the true nature of the front lines of battle.

Colour photography in particular was a rarity in those days, and so it was with pleasure that I recently discovered a series of images from German photographer Hans Hildenbrand, that have, depicting life in the German army during the 1914-1918 war.

Hans Hildenbrand

 

Hans Hildenbrand



Hans Hildenbrand

Hildenbrand's photos are mostly from Alsace and Champagne in 1915 and 1916, and they offer a fascinating insight into the war from the other side of no man's land. But was war really just men in immaculate uniforms, on sunny days and in clean trenches, playing cards or standing orderly with rifles?

Is this really a true depiction of what war was like? Actually the photographers were constrained to the technology of their time: due to the film's lack of sensitivity, every shot would be posed for long periods of time, especially for colour photographs: this can give the photographs an “unnatural feel” says the Daily Telegraph. Well yes, if pictures are posed for long amounts of time then they are unnatural: they are posed. Presumably the way that the photographer wanted them to be posed too. No doubt his photos had to achieve his stylistic ideals too, and I’m sure they had to be sensitive to the German nation’s anxiety about the success of the war. As discussed in a previous blog, a photograph can be a powerful tool for propaganda.

Take the notorious instance during the Battle of Iwo Jima in the Second World War, when the Americans raised a flag to show they had conquered the island. upset that he had missed such an iconic shot, a war photographer grabbed some replacement soldiers, and asked them to pull down the flag, then put it back up again slowly, to ensure he got his shot. Back in the USA the photo became such a hit that the men who had so courageously lifted the flag were brought home, and went around the country as heroes, as a useful government propaganda tool for recruitment and support for the American war effort. Except they took the wrong men. They took the second batch that had lifted up the flag during the safety of the battle aftermath, not the initial batch of soldiers who had risked death in order to lift it up during the battle itself.

Raising the American flag at Iwo Jima

So we must treat World War I photography with caution. Photographs can tell us so much, yet they can also lie, or tell us very little at all.

However, unlike during the Second World War, photographers of the Great War did actually have more or less a free rein with regard to what they captured. Notice the amount of destruction in the background which at the time was clearly viewed with objectivity. The most famous wartime French photograph was Jules Gervais-Courtellemont, who was unafraid to capture the war’s awful brutality:



Gervais-Courtellemont



 

Gervais-Courtellemont



Perhaps with the truth of total destruction and ghastliness of the war all around them, the French public was less sensitive than the Germans, who were a little further removed from the battle scene. Thus the Frenchman’s photographs present perhaps a more realistic version of war, particularly with regards to architectural damage, and dead bodies, than those of Hildenbrand.

It is important to recognize the vital work that war photographers do. And it is always a delight to find colour photographs of a time so long ago, in an event so monumental. But we must always make sure we know what we are looking at, what the background truly is of the image we are seeing, before we make a judgment about the event itself. Hildenbrand’s photographs today seem wholly disconnected to our knowledge of the horrors of the Great War. But they are important, and whether they may or may not be telling a wholly truthful story, they nevertheless give us an important insight into life on the front line, and of Germany’s sensitivity to too disturbing images.