The theorist Susan Sontag wrote:

“For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war.”

While our perception and understanding of the 20th century is intrinsically linked to the images of its conflicts, photography’s ever-increasing ubiquity has perhaps desensitise us. If photography was meant to show us our true natures and in so doing shock us into action, then it has failed.

Throughout history, we have sought ways to illustrate our wars. However, the notion of an ‘artist’ who could produce work in real-time for publication was incongruent. Before the telegraph, news from the front line could take days or even weeks to make it home. Likewise the concept of daily newspapers or periodicals only emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The vast majority of illustrations were not produced by artists on the front line but by craftsman in the studio, rendering drawings based on oral accounts or testimonies from those who had fought.

From Goya’s The Disasters of War: Enterrar y callar (Bury them and keep quiet) and Lo mismo (The same).

During the Crimean War (1853–56), the burgeoning newspaper industry coincided with technological advances, marking the first occurrence of what we would call conflict reportage. With the invention of the telegraph, correspondents were able to transmit reports from the field to editors back home almost instantaneously.

One of the first ‘artists’ commissioned to document the effects of war was Roger Fenton. He chose photography over illustration but, to avoid offending Victorian sensibilities, refrained from documenting dead bodies. If the first correspondents and photographers demonstrated restraint with this new medium, the emergence of the war photographer during the American Civil War would make it the most documented conflict of the 19th century. The role of the camera in capturing conflict would only expand in the 20th century.

Roger Fenton’s photographic van and ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’ in Crimea.

The practicalities of photomechanical reproduction meant that newspapers continued to commission illustrators throughout the 19th century, but artists’ drawings were increasingly based on photographs taken in the immediacy of battle. The inspiration for war artists had shifted from oral histories to photographic templates.

When The War Illustrated was first published at the start of World War I by William Berry, owner of The Daily Telegraph, its focus on illustration over photography saw its circulation peak at over one million. And US generals during World War I and II preferred to enlist artists over photographers in covering frontline conflicts, believing illustrations better expressed the ‘experiences’ of war. The Navy Combat Art Programme even trained artists and illustrators along with regular troops.

However, by the 1930s the popularity of new photographic reportage periodicals, such as Life magazine, began to claim photography as the best way to document conflict. Vietnam became the first ‘photojournalists’ war’ where the true power of the media, let loose without regulation or censorship, saw it fought on televisions and in newspapers, but it also made governments weary of the power of the photographic image.

From the First Gulf War through to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the embargo on images of dead soldiers and the embedding of photojournalists increasingly stunted photography’s ability to function as a tool of truth and to convey the image of conflict objectively. Its objectivity and immediacy, the very attributes that had made it so appealing to editors and audiences alike, were increasingly used by the authorities to sanitise and censor.

Added to this the increasing proliferation and beautification of the war image – the paradigm shift from ‘dead body’ shock to aesthetic object – made Sontag’s assertion that “a photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show” ever more distorted. Perhaps this demonstrated the limitations of photography in a world dominated by photographs.

There is no question that, at its most visceral, artistic depictions of war have the ability to comment on the human condition at its most vulnerable and nihilistic. Goya’s The Disasters of War prints still resonate – not just as a record of the terror inflicted during Napoleon’s occupation of Spain – but as universal indictment of the horrors of conflict. And yet Goya, unlike 20th century war photographers, never witnessed first-hand the horror he so accurately articulated.

However, just as the US generals viewed the suitability of illustration to capture the experience of war, perhaps Goya’s prints, although not intended as an objective account of what happened, made sense out of the madness of war.

In a time when images of death are everywhere and the demand for up-to-date news coverage can be satisfied by anyone with a phone, perhaps the whisper of the illustrated image really is louder than the shout.

Our upcoming event, In the Picture: Illustration in Times of War, with George Butler will be held on Wednesday 16 April 2014, at 7:00pm. Find out more and book online here.

Panos Pictures, Reportage by Getty Images and VII Photo all hosted events at the Club and a half-day seminar with VII Photo took place at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. A short video with a selection of clips from Photo Week can be viewed below.

Freelance photographers contributed images for a slideshow which was on display in the Club throughout the week. You can view their contributions in the following video- enjoy!

In an evening of contrast, colour and laughs, Reportage by Getty Images showcased two of their key talents, Peter Dench and Tom Stoddart.

After reviewing portfolios at Getty’s Open Edit with his team all day, Vice President of Photo Assignment for Getty Images Aidan Sullivan introduced the evening with a short overview of the kind of work Reportage by Getty Images engages in. He explained that Reportage, five years old this September, is an autonomous agency within Getty and was launched as:

“an agency [to] represent what we believe to be some of the finest photojournalists working today. We set about creating this website, bringing in the photographers, and I’m very privileged to work with not only some of the greatest photographers around today, but also the greatest editors, many of them are here this evening. It’s a joy to work with them and share their passion, and it is real passion.”

Peter Dench demonstrated some of that passion as he took the audience through a sample of images featured in his crowd-funded book England Uncensored.

“I think it’s appropriate that Tom is here giving a talk tonight as well, because visually we’re both very, very different, but I think we still share the same drive and enthusiasm to tell an engaging story through our photographs.”

Dench‘s playful delivery buoyed the audience along as he provided an irreverent look at this green and pleasant land and its relationship with getting pissed. Full of bright colour, Dench made a point of contrasting his work with Stoddart‘s:

“When I joined IPG Tom […] gave me some advice. He said “Peter, if you photograph a woman in a yellow dress, all you see is the yellow dress, but if you photograph her in black and white, you see her soul”. After I’d wiped up the wine I’d splattered down my top I said “Tom, you’re wasting your breath, all I see is a picture without colour.”

The widely respected Tom Stoddart, who has worked with Aidan Sullivan for 35 years, also picked up on Sullivan‘s comments about passion.

“It’s the one thing that I think that people trying to get into the industry don’t really understand. This is not a job, it’s an existence.”

Referencing the great Don McCullin, who had popped by the Club earlier, and his commitment to photography still at the age of 75, underlined his point.

Like McCullin, Stoddart is known for his images of war and human suffering. Stoddart‘s Perspectives exhibition, featuring classic images of disasterous world events he has covered over the years, opens on the 25th of July to highlight the International Committee of the Red Cross’s Healthcare in Danger campaign.

While speaking of going back to Sarajevo to meet the Bosnian war’s survivors who he had photographed, Stoddart said:

“It’s great- it’s not very often you get the chance to square the circle in our work, you’re normally in someone’s face for 5/100th of a second- I once worked out that I probably worked only 2 minutes in my life”

Stoddart’s work couldn’t be more different from Dench’s, but Sullivan pointed out that they are both storytellers with serious messages behind their work. A true showcase for Reportage, the evening demonstrated how varied their stories can be and the breadth of subject-matter photojournalism can cover.

Watch the event in full or subscribe to the Frontline podcast on iTunes.

Established and budding photojournalists are invited to bring their portfolio (all the portfolio review slots are now filled) and network with others in their field. This event is free, but advance booking is required.

The event will take place between 10am and 5pm with a lunchbreak from 12pm to 2pm.

Click here to book lunch in the restaurant.

Throughout Photo Week 2012 a presentation of images by freelance photojournalists will be on display in the Club. If you would like your images to be included in the presentation, please send three landscape images of around 300KB each to events@www.beta.frontlineclub.com.

Sponsored by:

Our Change season continues on Friday with a screening of Cocaine Unwrapped, which exposes the human cost for those caught up in a global operation that brings this drug to the UK’s streets.  On Monday The Truth That Wasn’t There is a fascinating film shot by novice student journalists which raises important questions about journalistic responsibility in the midst of an internationally significant story.

Next Tuesday, we will be looking at counterinsurgency strategies launched in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that took place almost 10 years ago – were they doomed to fail? Our In the Picture with Toby Smith on China’s new energy pioneers has been rescheduled to Wednesday, 24 August. 

Follow us on Twitter and catch up on any events you missed on the Forum blogor download our podcasts on iTunes.

How do photographers establish themselves in the competitive world of photojournalism? If you’re not represented by an agency what’s the best way to secure stories and promote your work? Go it alone and try and make a name for yourself in the dog-eat-dog photography business? Or form a collective?

Documentography is a group of photographers who collaborate internationally covering documentary, reportage, portraiture and fine art. Since 2000 this collection of five very different and equally talented photographers has worked together to promote their work and share their success. They combine forces to produce a quarterly web magazine, ISSUE.

Two members of Documentography, Guilhem Alandry and Anna Kåri, will be at the Frontline Club to discuss their collective and their varied techniques, including their innovative joint project about a shanty town built on a rubbish tip in Sierra Leone commissioned by Save the Children.

The event will be moderated by Jennifer Pollard, a Senior Lecturer in History & Theory of Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication. She specialises in the history of photojournalism and documentary, trauma, and globalized visual culture.

Guilhem Alandry is a videographer, photographer and multimedia producer. His use of 360-degree documentary technique has won him awards and has been used in print, interactive projects, exhibitions and TV. He won the Olympus Digital Elements Award 2003 and the Olympus Digital Photographer of the Year in the Observer Hodge Award 2004.

Anna Kåri’s specialties are humanitarian issues of migration, refugees, identity and human rights. The Danish photographer has worked extensively in the Balkans, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan and West Africa. Her 5-year long project “The Roma refugees from Kosovo” won a Metro young photographers bursary award, The Tom Webster Award and was a runner up in the Ian Parry Awards. In 2005, Kåri was selected for the World Press Masterclass.