1.
By –
Dhruv Gupta
World War
Photography

2.
World War I (1914–1919)
• The Start of the War
World War I began on July 28, 1914, when Austria-Hungary declared war
on Serbia. This seemingly small conflict between two countries spread rapidly:
soon, Germany, Russia, Great Britain, and France were all drawn into the war,
largely because they were involved in Treaties that obligated them to defend
certain other nations. Western and eastern Fronts quickly opened along the
borders of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

3.
The End of the War and Armistice
The war ended in the late fall of 1918, after the member countries of the
Central Powers signed Armistice Agreements one by one. Germany was the
last, signing its armistice on November 11, 1918. As a result of these
agreements, Austria-Hungary was broken up into several smaller countries.
Germany, under the Treaty Of Versailles, was severely punished with hefty
economic reparations, territorial losses, and strict limits on its rights to develop
militarily.

4.
World War II
World War II, also called Second World War, conflict that involved virtually
every part of the world during the years 1939–45. The
principal belligerents were the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—and
the Allies—France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and, to a
lesser extent, China. The war was in many respects a continuation, after an
uneasy 20-year hiatus, of the disputes left unsettled by World War I. The
40,000,000–50,000,000 deaths incurred in World War II make it the bloodiest
conflict, as well as the largest war, in history.

5.
World War II ended in 1945
• World War 2 ended with the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers.
• VE Day and street parties | V-J Day
• Germany surrenders
On 8 May 1945, the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender, about a week after Adolf Hitler had committed suicide.
• VE Day - Victory in Europe Day
• VE Day – Victory in Europe celebrates the end of the Second World War on 8 May 1945.
• 8 May 1945 - Winston Churchill announced VE Day - Victory in Europe. This day marks the end of WW2 in Europe.
• Street parties were held all over Britain to celebrate the end of the war.
• V-J Day - Victory in Japan Day.
• 15 August 1945 - Japan surrenders to the Allies V-J Day (Victory in Japan)
• 2 September 1945 - Having agreed in principle to unconditional surrender on 15 August 1945, Japan formally surrenders, ending World War II
throughout the rest of the world.
• The surrender was signed on 2 Sept. 1945 aboard the battleship U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

6.
A journalist’s life in the trenches
• “The First World War is the conflict in which the concept of documentary truth first
evolved,” said Hilary Roberts, the photography curator at the Imperial War
Museums in London,
• The correspondents themselves were required to wear officers’ uniforms – khaki
jacket and tie with trousers tucked into puttees; regulation boots and a peaked cap,
which could be swapped for a tin helmet when danger dictated. They were given the
honorary rank of captain and, apart from a green armband, were indistinguishable
from real officers. As it turned out, it wasn’t just their appearance that made the
reporters seem part of the army. In their thinking, too, they soon fell into step with
the officers around them.

7.
• They appointed official photographers, most of whom had worked for newspapers
before joining the military. They used medium-format cameras that produced small
glass-plate negatives – the Leica, which popularized the 35-millimeter film format,
was still 10 years from being released to the public.
• The first photographer appointed by Britain was Ernest Brooks.

8.
An official German photographer at work on the Western Front in 1917.Credit Germany Army Bild
und Film Amt, via Imperial War Museums.

9.
Roger Fenton
• Roger Fenton, (28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869) was a British photographer. He was noted
as one of the first war photographers. After graduating with an arts degree he gained a keen
interest in new technology. At the time, new technology meant photography.
• Between 1851/52, he began photographing and exhibiting his own images. From there, he
became a leading British photographer. He was a founding member of the Royal
Photographic Society.
• In 1854, London print publisher Thomas Agnew & Sons commissioned him to document
events occurring in Crimea. He became one of a handful of photographers to cover the
Crimean war.
• The equipment at the time was large and cumbersome. For him to photograph anything, he
needed a horse-drawn cart and an assistant capturing via long exposure.
• Because of these limitations, he was only able to capture posed images of stationary objects.
He captured the landscapes as he wanted to avoid photographing dead or mutilated bodies.
• He didn’t gain much commercial success with these images. After returning to Britain, he
travelled across the country, recording landscapes.

10.
Margaret Bourke-White
• Margaret Bourke-White (14 June 1904 – 27 August 1971) was the first female war
correspondent. She was also the first woman allowed to work in combat zones during
World War II.
• In 1941, she travelled to the Soviet Union when Germany broke its non-aggression pact.
She was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when German forces invaded. She took
refuge in the U.S. Embassy. And captured the ensuing firestorms on camera.
• As the war progressed, she left for North Africa alongside the U.S. Army Air Force. After
that, she joined the U.S. Army in Italy and later, Germany. She came under fire many times
in Italy.
• Her interest in photography started as a hobby. Her father supported her as he had an
interest in old cameras. After her father’s death, she left her Herpetology studies. She
bounced around a few different colleges before graduating from Cornell.
• It was only in 1928 that she turned to photography full time. She opened her commercial
photography studio in New York. A year later, she became the staff photographer for
Fortune magazine until 1935.

11.
Robert Capa
• Robert Capa (Endre Friedmann; 22 October 1913 – 25 May 1954) was a
Hungarian war photographer and photojournalist. He worked alongside his
companion and professional partner, photographer Gerda Taro.
• Many consider Capa to be the most famous war photographer in history. This
is partly down to controversy, extensive combat photography and the way he
died.
• Born in Budapest, he felt the political oppression of the time, forcing him to
flee to Berlin. Here, he saw the rise of Hitler, which led him to move to Paris.
It was in Paris that he met and began to work with Gerta Pohorylle.
• She changed her name to Gerda Taro. He changed his to Robert Capa, a name
he picked up from his ‘shark’ tactics in street photography. They both
published work under his name until her name change, then her work was
published separately.
• Robert Capa covered five wars. The Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-
Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and the
First Indochina War. His images found themselves across the globe, published
in magazine and newspapers.

12.
Homai Vyarawalla
• Homai Vyarawalla, (“Dalda 13”), Indian photojournalist
(born Dec. 9, 1913, Navsari, Gujarat, British India—died Jan.
15, 2012, Vadodara, Gujarat, India), broke social barriers as
her country’s first female professional photographer, capturing
black-and-white images that examined India’s history from its
struggle for independence from Britain in the 1940s until her
abrupt retirement in 1970 soon after the death of her husband
(Maneckshaw Vyarawalla).
• In World War II, while working for the Far Eastern bureau of
the British Information Services in New Delhi, Ms.
Vyarawalla began accepting freelance assignments that gave
her access to India’s political circles. Her photographs were
published in Time, Life and The Illustrated Weekly of India,
among other publications. In one series she recorded a day in
the life of Indian firefighters during wartime.

13.
Lee Miller
• Lee Miller was a shape-shifter: a beautiful model with a
brilliant artistic eye of her own, a fearless photojournalist
turned unconventional homemaker. She was a high-fashion
fixture in the 1920s, discovered when the publisher Condé
Nast pulled her out of the way of oncoming traffic – and
then on to the cover of Vogue. She became a war
correspondent, documenting the Second World War's front
line and concentration camps.-She became a war
correspondent, documenting the Second World War's front
line and concentration camps.
• She also, Suffering post-traumatic stress disorder after what
she had witnessed during the war, Miller turned to drink For
20 years of my life she was an alcoholic, and a depressive.

14.
Poems
August, 1914
BY VERA MARY BRITTAIN
God said, “Men have forgotten Me:
The souls that sleep shall wake again,
And blinded eyes must learn to see.”
So since redemption comes through pain
He smote the earth with chastening rod,
And brought destruction's lurid reign;
But where His desolation trod
The people in their agony
Despairing cried, “There is no God.”
To Germany
BY CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY
You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
But gropers both through fields of thought confined
We stumble and we do not understand.
You only saw your future bigly planned,
And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,
And in each other's dearest ways we stand,
And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.
When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other's truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm
We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm
The darkness and the thunder and the rain

15.
The War in the Air
BY HOWARD NEMEROV
For a saving grace, we didn't see our dead,
Who rarely bothered coming home to die
But simply stayed away out there
In the clean war, the war in the air.
Seldom the ghosts come back bearing their tales
Of hitting the earth, the incompressible sea,
But stayed up there in the relative wind,
Shades fading in the mind,
Who had no graves but only epitaphs
Where never so many spoke for never so few:
Per ardua, said the partisans of Mars,
Per aspera, to the stars.
That was the good war, the war we won
As if there was no death, for goodness's sake.
With the help of the losers we left out there
In the air, in the empty air.

16.
The Pictures that Defined World War I
Getting the perfect shot in wartime is not only about weapons. Photographers were
there every step of the way to capture the heroic triumphs and devastating losses.
MADISON HORNE

17.
French soldiers on horseback in street, with an airship
"DUPUY DE LOME" flying in air behind them,
between ca. 1914.
French soldiers in a bayonet charge, up a steep slope
in the Argonne Forest in 1915. During the Second
Battle of Champagne, 450,000 French soldiers
advanced against a force of 220,000 Germans,
momentarily gaining a small amount of territory, but
losing it back to the Germans within weeks. Combined
casualties came to more than 215,000 from this battle
alone.

18.
French soldiers wearing gas masks in a trench, 1917.
gas mask technology varied widely during the war,
eventually developing into an effective defense,
limiting the value of gas attacks in later years
Gassed patients are treated at the 326th Field
Hospital near Royaumeix, France, on August 8, 1918.
The hospital was not large enough to accommodate
the large number of patients

19.
Men wounded in the Ypres battle of September 20th,
1917. Walking along the Menin road, to be taken to the
clearing station. German prisoners are seen assisting at
stretcher bearing
A gigantic shell crater, 75 yards in circumference, Ypres,
Belgium, October 1917

20.
The Pictures that Defined World War II

21.
Adolf Hitler and his entourage walk near the Eiffel
Tower in Paris on June 23, 1940, following the
occupation of France by the Nazis.
A Parisian man weeps as the Germans take control of the
city in 1940.This photo speaks volumes about the
impending sense of doom they felt. Invasion was the fear
of all Allied nations.

22.
This photograph was found amongst others in a
report by the SS General Stroop titled, “The Jewish
Quarter of Warsaw is No More!”
This 1944 photograph shows a pile of remaining
bones at the Nazi concentration camp of Majdanek,
the second largest death camp in Poland after
Auschwitz.

23.
This Pulitzer Prize winning photo has become
synonymous with American victory. Taken during
the Battle of Iwo Jima by Associated
Press photographer Joe Rosenthal
This photograph was taken on April 30, 1945, during
the Battle of Berlin. Soviet soldiers took their flag in
victory and raised it over the rooftops of the bombed-
out Reichstag.