Much has been written about the relationship between images, photography, reality and truth. Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes come to mind, as do semiotics and hermeneutics. Images are in many ways more powerful than words. They are often more suggestive and they allow for the projection of subliminal (or not-so-subliminal) messages. Think of the Two Minutes Hate that George Orwell’s Winston Smith is forced to undergo every day. Images often appeal to pathos and ethos rather than to logos.
Images and photographs derive their meaning from context and from the person seeking to make sense of an image. Interpretation necessarily requires subjectivity and it involves contingency. That said, the best photographs (like the best art) seem to have a universalistic quality, much less subject to subjectivity and contingency. The signing of the surrender declaration aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay in August 1945 may elicit different interpretations or at the very least different affective response in patriotic Americans and imperialistic Japanese (as well as in imperialistic Japanese and pacifist Japanese). Photos like Shell-Shocked US Marine or Bloody Saturday (see below) seem to possess a much more universalistic quality. Most people will see the common humanity and universalistic truths about war, brutality and pain in these images.
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| Disaster of War (Francisco Goya 1810-20) |
Images and photographs often come to represent, symbolise and even stand in for complex events, including military conflicts. Before the advent of photography, the world had to rely on the artistic renderings of wars. Most people who think of the Peninsular War (1808-14), for example, will think of Goya’s Disasters of War sketches. To this day, Picasso’s Guernica remains a more powerful representation of “Guernica” than any black-and-white photograph of the aerial bombing of the Spanish village. This is all the more curious as a single abstract painting comes closer to the truth or essence of the bombing than any series of factual photographs. This is because the painting refers not just to “Guernica”, but to the brutality of all armed conflict.
Interestingly, compared to WWII or the Vietnam War, there seem to be few (if any) truly iconic images of WWI. There is plenty of documentary photographic evidence, But few, if any photo has ingrained itself in the collective or even the national collective mind. In Britain, the work of the war poets is better known than any photograph. WWII, by contrast, produced next to no poetry, not in Britain, not anywhere (
Hynes 2018); but many WWII photos reached iconic status. In France and Germany, WWI is more likely to evoke novels such as
Im Westen Nichts Neues or
Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit, or, in both countries, films like
La Grande Illusion, rather than war photographs. Again, a George Grosz painting is closer to the “truth” than a photograph, at least in the present collective mind. This is not to say that there are no photos that represent the meaning of WWI and may deserve iconic status. It just that it so happens that photographs of this conflict hold a less prominent role in the collective consciousness than other cultural artefacts.
The apparent documentary quality of photographs gives them the semblance of being more real and closer to the “truth”. Art is a lie that reveals the truth (Picasso). This is why some artistic renderings are so powerful, compared to photographs. The meaning of an event is not necessarily captured in the representativeness or even the mere the facticity of an image depicting that event. And curiously, the very first war photographer, Robert Fenton (1819-69), actually staged one his best-known photographs of the Crimean War (1853-56)c called In the Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855).
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| Valley of the Shadow of Death (Roger Fenton 1855) |
Not only may a photograph not be representative, but the event it depicts may be partially or completely staged. John Ford famously happened to be present at the Battle at Midway (1942) and shot live footage, which became a famous film. But footage that has a similarly authentic feel, like John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro, was completely re-enacted. Same goes for ionic photographs. The famous Raising of the Flag on Iwo Jima (1945) was at least once re-staged and the Raising of a flag over the Reichstag (1945) was completely staged. That said, actual, factual footage can also be presented in a completely misleading way (just pick about any German Wochenschau during WWII). Some of the most powerful representations of the brutality of war and genocide are Claude Lanzman’s Shoah (1985) and Alan Resnais’ Night and Fog (1956). Neither makes use of any footage depicting the events they explore, and yet the images (and, admittedly, words) do get to the essence in a way that nothing else ever has.
Many symbolic images are explicitly and self-consciously staged. That does not make them non-factual, but they often do feel less "real". A photograph may be both factual and staged. Implied spontaneity gives an image greater authenticity. General MacArthur wading onshore in the Philippines in 1944, from where Japanese forces had expelled him and the US army in 1941, had to be re-enacted several times, it is rumoured, until the photographers was able to get the "right" shot. By comparison, a photo of 6’00’’ MacArthur towering over 5’5’’ Emperor Hirohito is factual and it is staged and it is symbolic. It is not any less accidental than MacArthur wading ashore (once you know that the latter had to be re-enacted), but it feels less "in-authentic". President Mitterrand and Chancellor Kohl standing hand-in-hand at Verdun to commemorate WWI is staged, not spontaneous, factual and highly symbolic. Photos can do many things.
Common tropes characterise most of the best-known war photographs, photographs forming part of the collective consciousness of war. Here is a far from exhaustive list of tropes and photographs.
Soldiers Going Into Combat
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| Battle of the Somme (1916) |
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| Taxis to Hell and Back (Robert Sargent 1944) |
Destruction of Cities
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| St. Paul Survives (Herbert Manson 1940) |
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| View From Dresden's Townhall (1945) |
Fallen Soldiers
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| Falling Soldier (Robert Capa 1936) |
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| Three Dead Americans Lie on the Beach at Buna (George Strock 1942) |
War Refracted On Soldiers’ Faces
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| Marine Capt. Francis "Ike" Fenton (David Duncan Douglas 1950) |
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| Shell-Shocked US Marine, Battle Of Hue (Don McCullin 1968) |
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| Execution of Soviet Partisans (1943) |
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| Saigon Execution (Eddie Adams 1968) |
Children As Victims Of War
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Bloody Saturday (HS Wong 1937)
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| Warsaw Ghetto Boy (Roger Viollet 1943) |
Flag Raising After Victory
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| Raising the Flag On Iwo Jima (Joe Rosenthal 1945) |
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| Raising a Flag Over the Reichstag (Yevgeny Khaldei 1945) |
Victory & Defeat vs Defeat & Victory
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| Occupation of Paris (1940) |
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| Liberation of Paris (1944) |
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| Soviet Planes Over Berlin (1945) |
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| US Planes Over Tokyo (1945) |
Peace At Last
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| Czech Mother Kisses Russian Soldier During Liberation of Prague (1945) |
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| V-J Day in Times Square (Alfred Eisenstaedt 1945) |
