La fotografía de guerra implica fotografiar conflictos armados y sus efectos en personas y lugares. Los fotógrafos que participan en este género pueden encontrarse en peligro y, a veces, mueren tratando de sacar sus fotografías de la arena de guerra.
Historia
Orígenes
Con la invención de la fotografía en la década de 1830, se exploró por primera vez la posibilidad de capturar los eventos de la guerra para aumentar la conciencia pública. Aunque idealmente a los fotógrafos les hubiera gustado registrar con precisión la acción rápida del combate , la insuficiencia técnica de los primeros equipos fotográficos para registrar el movimiento lo hacía imposible. El daguerrotipo , una forma temprana de fotografía que generaba una sola imagen utilizando una placa de cobre recubierta de plata , tomó mucho tiempo para que la imagen se desarrollara y no se pudo procesar de inmediato. [ cita requerida ]
Dado que los primeros fotógrafos no podían crear imágenes de sujetos en movimiento, registraron aspectos más sedentarios de la guerra, como fortificaciones, soldados y tierras antes y después de la batalla, junto con la recreación de escenas de acción. Al igual que en la fotografía de batalla, a menudo también se representaban imágenes de retratos de soldados. Para producir una fotografía, el sujeto tenía que estar perfectamente quieto durante unos minutos, por lo que se posó para que se sintiera cómodo y minimizara el movimiento. [ cita requerida ]
Varios daguerrotipos fueron tomados de la ocupación de Saltillo durante la guerra entre México y Estados Unidos , en 1847, por un fotógrafo desconocido, aunque no con fines periodísticos. [1] [2]
John McCosh , cirujano del ejército de Bengala , es considerado por algunos historiadores como el primer fotógrafo de guerra conocido por su nombre. [3] [4] Produjo una serie de fotografías que documentan la Segunda Guerra Anglo-Sikh de 1848 a 1849. Estas consistían en retratos de compañeros oficiales, figuras clave de las campañas, [3] administradores y sus esposas e hijas, incluido Patrick. Alexander Vans Agnew , [5] : 911 Hugh Gough, primer vizconde Gough ; el comandante británico, el general Sir Charles James Napier ; y Dewan Mulraj , el gobernador de Multan . [6] [7] También fotografió a la gente y la arquitectura locales, [7] emplazamientos de artillería y las secuelas destructivas. [5] McCosh luego fotografió la Segunda Guerra Anglo-Birmana (1852–53) donde fotografió a colegas, capturó armas, arquitectura de templos en Yangon y gente birmana. [3]
El húngaro - rumano Károly Szathmáry Papp tomó fotografías de varios oficiales en 1853 y de escenas de guerra cerca de Olteniţa y Silistra en 1854, durante la Guerra de Crimea . Él personalmente ofreció unos 200 álbumes de fotografías a Napoleón III de Francia y la Reina Victoria del Reino Unido en 1855. [8]
Stefano Lecchi entre 1849 y 1859 tomó fotos de los lugares de batalla de la República Romana utilizando el proceso Calotype [9]
Establecimiento
Los primeros intentos oficiales de fotografía de guerra fueron realizados por el gobierno británico al comienzo de la Guerra de Crimea . En marzo de 1854, Gilbert Elliott recibió el encargo de fotografiar las vistas de las fortificaciones rusas a lo largo de la costa del mar Báltico . [10] Roger Fenton fue el primer fotógrafo de guerra oficial y el primero en intentar una cobertura sistemática de la guerra en beneficio del público. [5] [11]
Contratado por Thomas Agnew , aterrizó en Balaclava en 1854. Sus fotografías probablemente tenían la intención de contrarrestar la aversión general del pueblo británico a la impopularidad de la guerra y contrarrestar los informes ocasionalmente críticos del corresponsal William Howard Russell de The Times . [12] [13] Las fotos se convirtieron en bloques de madera y se publicaron en The Illustrated London News .
Due to the size and cumbersome nature of his photographic equipment, Fenton was limited in his choice of motifs. Because the photographic material of his time needed long exposures, he was only able to produce pictures of stationary objects, mostly posed pictures; he avoided making pictures of dead, injured or mutilated soldiers.[citation needed]
Fenton also photographed the landscape – his most famous image was of the area near to where the Charge of the Light Brigade took place. In letters home soldiers had called the original valley The Valley of Death, so when in September 1855 Thomas Agnew put the picture on show as one of a series of eleven collectively titled Panorama of the Plateau of Sebastopol in Eleven Parts in a London exhibition, he took the troops' epithet, expanded it as The Valley of the Shadow of Death and assigned it to the piece.[14][15]
Further development
Fenton left the Crimea in 1855, and was replaced by the partnership of James Robertson and Felice Beato. In contrast to Fenton's depiction of the dignified aspects of war, Beato and Robertson showed the destruction.[16] They photographed the fall of Sevastopol in September 1855, producing about 60 images.[17]
In February 1858, they arrived in Calcutta to document the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857.[18] During this time they produced possibly the first-ever photographic images of corpses.[19] It is believed that for at least one of the photographs taken at the palace of Sikandar Bagh in Lucknow, the skeletal remains of Indian rebels were disinterred or rearranged to heighten the photograph's dramatic impact.
In 1860 Beato left the partnership and documented the progress of the Anglo-French campaign during the Second Opium War. Teaming up with Charles Wirgman, a correspondent for The Illustrated London News, he accompanied the attack force travelling north to the Taku Forts. Beato's photographs of the Second Opium War were the first to document a military campaign as it unfolded, doing so through a sequence of dated and related images.[20] His photographs of the Taku Forts formed a narrative recreation of the battle, showing the approach to the forts, the effects of bombardments on the exterior walls and fortifications, and finally the devastation within the forts, including the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers.[20]
During the American Civil War, Haley Sims and Alexander Gardner began recreating scenes of battle in order to overcome the limitations of early photography with regard to the recording of moving objects. Their reconfigured scenes were designed to intensify the visual and emotional effects of battle.[21]
Gardner and Mathew Brady rearranged bodies of dead soldiers during the Civil War in order to create a clear picture of the atrocities associated with battle.[22] In Soldiers on the Battlefield, Brady produced a controversial tableau of the dead within a desolate landscape. This work, along with Alexander Gardner's 1863 work, Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, were images which, when shown to the public, brought home the horrific reality of war.[23]
Also during the Civil War, George S. Cook captured what is likely and sometimes believed to be the world's first photographs of actual combat, during the Union bombardment of Confederate fortifications near Charleston – his wet-plate photographs taken under fire show explosions and Union ships firing at southern positions September 8, 1863.[24] By coincidence, northern photographers Haas and Peale made a photographic plate of USS New Ironsides in combat September 7, 1863.
The most lethal war in South American history was the Paraguayan War of 1865–1870. It was also the first occasion for South American war photography. In June 1866, the Montevideo firm of Bate y Compañía commissioned the Uruguayan photographer Javier López to travel to the field of battle.[25]
López used the wet-plate collodion process, making and developing his plates in a portable darkroom. The plates were sensitive to blue light only; his darkroom was an orange tent. This was the first time photography had covered South American warfare and his images became iconic.[26] The firm did send a photographer to cover the Siege of Paysandú the year before, but he arrived after the fighting was over. He captured images of the ruined town and corpses in a street.
The Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878–1880 was photographed by John Burke who traveled with the British forces. This was a commercial venture with the hope of selling albums of war photographs.
20th century
World War I was one of the first conflicts during which cameras were small enough to be carried on one's person. Canadian soldier Jack Turner secretly and illegally brought a camera to the battlefront and made photographs.[27]
In the 20th century, professional photographers covered all the major conflicts, and many were killed as a consequence, among which was Robert Capa, who covered the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, the D-Day landings and the fall of Paris, and conflicts in the 1950s until his death by a landmine in Indochina in May 1954.[28][29] Photojournalist Dickey Chapelle was killed by a landmine in Vietnam, in November 1965. The Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima in 1945 was taken by photojournalist Joe Rosenthal.[30]
Unlike paintings, which presented a single illustration of a specific event, photography offered the opportunity for an extensive amount of imagery to enter circulation. The proliferation of the photographic images allowed the public to be well informed in the discourses of war. The advent of mass-reproduced images of war were not only used to inform the public but they served as imprints of the time and as historical recordings.[31]
Mass-produced images did have consequences. Besides informing the public, the glut of images in distribution over-saturated the market, allowing viewers to develop the ability to disregard the immediate value and historical importance of certain photographs.[21] Despite this, photojournalists continue to cover conflicts around the world.
Profesión hoy
Journalists and photographers are protected by international conventions of armed warfare, but history shows that they are often considered targets by warring groups — sometimes to show hatred of their opponents and other times to prevent the facts shown in the photographs from being known. War photography has become more dangerous with the advent of terrorism in armed conflict as some terrorists target journalists and photographers. In the Iraq War, 36 photographers and camera operators were abducted or killed during the conflict from 2003 to 2009.[32]
Several have even been killed by US fire; two Iraqi journalists working for Reuters were notably strafed by a helicopter during the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike, yielding a scandal when WikiLeaks published the video of the gun camera.[33] Hilda Clayton was killed when the mortar she was photographing accidentally exploded.[34] War photographers need not necessarily work near active fighting; instead they may document the aftermath of conflict. The German photographer Frauke Eigen created a photographic exhibition about war crimes in Kosovo which focused on the clothing and belongings of the victims of ethnic cleansing, rather than on their corpses.[35] Eigen's photographs were taken during the exhumation of mass graves, and were later used as evidence by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.[36]
Ver también
- Embedded journalism
- Photojournalism
- War artist
- War correspondent
Referencias
- ^ Daguerrotypes of the Mexican–American War
- ^ Hudson, Berkley (2009). Sterling, Christopher H. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Journalism. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE. pp. 1060-67. ISBN 978-0-7619-2957-4.
- ^ a b c Mary Warner Marien (2006). Photography: A Cultural History. London: Laurence King Publishing. p. 49. ISBN 978-1856694933.
- ^ Kari Andén-Papadopoulos (2011). Amateur Images and Global News. Intellect Books. p. 45. ISBN 9781841506005.
- ^ "John McCosh". University of St Andrews. Retrieved 1 October 2015.
- ^ a b Roger Taylor; Larry John Schaaf (2007). Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840–1860. Metropolitan Museum of Art. pp. 121–124. ISBN 978-0300124057.
- ^ Carol Popp de Szathmàri's 1854 war photos: http://archweb.cimec.ro/scripts/PCN/Clasate/detaliu.asp?k=0F09ED4E21424AA580A2C07E81236E42[permanent dead link] – http://archweb.cimec.ro/scripts/PCN/Clasate/detaliu.asp?k=60BD72B84B1846309395BB55F437C925[dead link]
- ^ Memory documented
- ^ "Fenton Crimean War Photographs". U.S. Library of Congress. Retrieved 5 February 2018.
- ^ "Crimean War: First Conflict to Be Documented in Detail by Photography". Vintage Works Ltd. Archived from the original on 2014-01-12. Retrieved 2014-01-12.
- ^ Gernsheim, Helmut; Gernsheim, Alison (1954). Roger Fenton, photographer of the Crimean War. London: Secker & Warburg. pp. 13–17. OCLC 250629696.
- ^ Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003; ISBN 0-374-24858-3)
- ^ The valley, called the "North Valley" by the British military, was just less than a mile wide and about a mile and a quarter long: Woodham-Smith, Cecil (1953). The Reason Why. London: John Constable. p. 238. OCLC 504665313.
- ^ Green-Lewis, Jennifer (1996). Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. pp. 126–127. ISBN 0-8014-3276-6.
- ^ Baldwin, Gordon, Malcolm Daniel, and Sarah Greenough. All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. ISBN 1-58839-128-0. p. 21
- ^ Broecker, William L., ed. International Center of Photography Encyclopedia of Photography. New York: Pound Press; Crown, 1984. ISBN 0-517-55271-X. p. 58.
- ^ Harris, David. Of Battle and Beauty: Felice Beato's Photographs of China. Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1999. ISBN 0-89951-101-5; ISBN 0-89951-100-7. p. 23
- ^ Zannier, Italo. Antonio e Felice Beato. Venice: Ikona Photo Gallery, 1983. (in Italian) OCLC 27711779. p. 447.
- ^ a b Lacoste, Anne. Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010.ISBN 1-60606-035-X. pp. 10–11.
- ^ a b Marien, Mary Warner, Photography: A Cultural History second edition (NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006), pp. 99, 111.
- ^ "Antietam, Maryland. Allan Pinkerton, President Lincoln, and Major General John A. McClernand: Another View". World Digital Library. 1862-10-03. Retrieved 2013-06-10.
- ^ Stokstad, Marylyn, Art History vol 2 revised 2nd edition (NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005), 1009.
- ^ Bombardment of Fort Sumter in 1863, sonofthesouth.net
- ^ Until 1997 it was believed, wrongly, that the author of the Bate & Cīa photographs was Esteban García. The identity of the real author was discovered by Alberto del Pino Menck ("Javier López, fotógrafo de Bate y Cía. en la Guerra del Paraguay", Boletín Histórico del Ejército 294–297, 1997). See also Cuarterolo, Miguel Angel (2004). "Images of War: Photographers and Sketch Artists of the Triple Alliance Conflict". In Kraay, Hendrik; Whigham, Thomas L. (eds.). I Die with My Country: Perspectives on the Paraguayan War, 1864–1870. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 154–178. ISBN 0-8032-2762-0.
- ^ Mauricio Bruno, Fotografía Militar, in Fotografía en Uruguay: historia y usos sociales 1840–1930, (2011, Montevideo), Centro Municipal de Fotografía, ISBN 9789974600751; accessed online [1], 21 May 2015.
- ^ CBC News, P.E.I. photographer's secret documentation of WW I goes on display, November 10, 2015, CBC News
- ^ Inc, Time (1938-05-23). LIFE. Time Inc.
- ^ Video: Cameramen Ready For Invasion, 1944/05/25 (1944). Universal Newsreel. 1944. Retrieved February 21, 2012.
- ^ Bernstein, Adam (2006-08-22). "Joe Rosenthal; Shot Flag-Raising at Iwo Jima". ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2017-11-06.
- ^ Kriebel, Sabine, "Theories of Photography: A Short History", in James Elkins, ed., Photographic Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 7–8.
- ^ Committee to Protect Journalists, July 23, 2008
- ^ Video posted of Apache strike which killed Reuters employees, Agence France-Presse, Apr 5, 2010
- ^ Martin, David (May 3, 2017). "Army combat photographer's last picture is of her own death". CBS News. Retrieved 3 May 2017.
- ^ "Fundstücke (Found Objects), Kosovo 2000". National Gallery of Canada.
- ^ "Exceptional Young Photographer – Frauke Eigen at the Berlin Gallery "Camera Work"". Deutsche Welle.[permanent dead link]
Otras lecturas
- Capa, Robert (1999). Heart of Spain: Robert Capa's photographs of the Spanish Civil War: from the collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. [Denville, N.J.]: Aperture Foundation, Inc. ISBN 0-89381-831-3
- Harris, David (1999). Of battle and beauty: Felice Beato's photographs of China. Santa Barbara, California: Santa Barbara Museum of Art. ISBN 0-89951-101-5
- Hodgson, Pat (1974). Early war photographs. Reading: Osprey Publishing. ISBN 0-85045-221-X
- Katz, D. Mark (1991). Witness to an era: the life and photographs of Alexander Gardner: the Civil War, Lincoln, and the West. New York, N.Y.: Viking. ISBN 0-670-82820-3
- James, Lawrence (1981). Crimea 1854-56: the war with Russia from contemporary photographs. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. ISBN 0-442-24569-6
- Lewinski, Jorge (1978). The camera at war: a history of war photography from 1848 to the present day. London: W. H. Allen. ISBN 0-491-02485-1
enlaces externos
- PBS on war photography
- Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library Includes war photographs by Roger Fenton, Felice Beato, Alexander Gardner, Mathew Brady and others.
- An Eyemo camera used in 1942 by Damien Parer filming the Academy Award-winning documentary, Kokoda Front Line!, in New Guinea is held at National Museum Australia Canberra
- Booknotes interview with Susan Moeller on Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat, April 23, 1989.
- All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860, exhibition catalog fully online as PDF from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which contains much of Fenton's war photography