Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Does war photography have a future ?

To answer this question, let's take a quick look at the war photography history. The first war images date from the Mexican-American war in 1847. In Europe, the first war pictures were taken during the Crimean War by several photographers like Carol Popp de Szathmari or Roger Fenton.


At this time there were few war photographers but war photography already raised a question: is war photography showing the reality of the war?
Some photographers from this time, like Alexander Gardner, recreated battle scenes to take better and clearer pictures.
This question about the reality was also a problem for the photographers of the 20th century, who covered all the majors conflicts in the world. One major change of the 20th century is that photographers can shot moving scenes thanks to the progress of the technology.
Photographers try to inform people, that's why some pictures become the best conflicts illustrations. During the 20th century, some photographers like Robert Capa or Joe Rosenthal became stars, well-known for their war pictures.
War photographer is still a dangerous job and some photographers died during reports, like the founder of the agency Magnum, Robert Capa.
Today, does war photography have a future?
One of the problem is that everybody can take pictures with a mobile phone, and these mobile pictures are published in newspapers. Video is also slowly killing photo, we can see more war scenes on Youtube then in newspapers, and war photography is still extremly dangerous, as we can see with the most recent conflicts.

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