War photographers like to say that they do their dangerous work so that the people back home can be kept informed about what is going on in one war zone or another. That means they see themselves as reporters, providing information more than interpretation. I think, rather, that they are more like artists who convey aesthetic experiences as well as, occasionally, information about what is going on. They take lightly their aesthetic role for the same reason that people who explore the aboriginal forests or track the path of sharks or manatees prefer to cast themselves as scientists, because they have titles associated with their names, rather than as outdoors people who love the wild and the sea. Academic publications are just an excuse for doing what they love. I guess war photographers just don’t want to admit that they are artists, even if the photography editors at major newspapers have an eye for recognizing, approvingly, whether their photographers are imitating the shadings and compositional styles of the Old Masters.
An artistic or aesthetic interest in a subject can mean looking at the balances and tensions in a composition, whether that is to the balance of trees and people in a painting or to the intersection of subsidiary stories into the overall narrative arc of a novel. Or, depending on your aesthetic theory, aesthetic experiences are the melding of a meaning with an experience concocted by the artist so as to reveal both the experience and its meaning at the same time, and so you are moved in “Macbeth” by the vividness of the descent into evil of the title character as well as by the viewer’s moral rejection of that path. All art and entertainment satisfies both these definitions, though circus acts may be relatively trivial in that the excitement they generate is the illusion of danger or the presentation of spectacle for its own sake rather than the creepiness and making visible the variety of humanity, that combination making Tod Browning’s early talkie “Freaks” into a work of art.
To see the contrast between the reportorial style and the artistic style, begin at the beginning, when war photography began, in the Crimean War, when the reportorial style dominated. Roger Fenton took photographs of Crimean War camps to show the people back home what it looked like to be living in a combat area.The photography of the American Civil War provided rich images of its appalling conditions, wounds, and destruction, and so supplied a record of what happened, or at least of what things looked like during warfare and in the wake of war. There are pictures of men at their campsites and so caught up in mud and unheated tents waiting to go off to battle. There are pictures of the amputees taken by physicians so as to show off the kinds of operations they had invented so as to perhaps allow a disfigured soldier to recover. There are pictures of the buildings and factories destroyed by Sherman and of the trenches in front of Petersburg during the end stages of the war. It should be said of course that the picture of the destruction of Charleston, South Carolina is well composed. A set of boys is sitting around a column in the center of the picture and most of the destruction is seen in the background, the eye of the viewer drawn first to one and then another feature of the photograph. Is there a point in that the children are all slaves? Is the column an image of the destruction of a once great civilization?
Many informational photographs are also aesthetic in nature. Grant is caught conferring with his top generals outside his tent in front of a tree. That doesn’t mean that they did not have indoor sit down conferences, only that their relations were informal enough that they could confer wherever they pleased. The tree is a nice setting for these men who are treelike in that they must bear the brunt of misfortune, the winds of war, as do trees, and get on with it. That is an aesthetic perception because it reflects on the nature of life and the feelings, however evanescent, that are engaged by such perceptions. Aesthetic reality is not to be contrasted with factive reality but rather with historical reality, which is about the causes and consequences of events rather than the feeling and being of the moment.
World War I photography was also informational however riveting are the iconic images of trench warfare and men going over the top and of the shelled battlefields through which troops moved forward. Those images still linger as a horror for the Western imagination, men moving forward to slaughter because the generals had not yet got quite right the way to combine artillery with an infantry assault. And that is so even though the deaths in World War II were much more numerous than those in World War I. The First World War feels as if it were fought at night and underground and amidst rotting corpses, while World War II is kinetic, fought on the run, in retreats and advances, so many battles fought right after one another.
World War II also saw photography used for more aesthetic purposes, though it would not have been explained that way. The first picture of dead American soldiers did not appear until Life Magazine published one in 1943 of three dead bodies, the faces hidden, washed up on a South Pacific beach. The intent was to introduce dead soldiers to the American civilian population in as unshocking a manner as possible, and so that meant tastefully, which was by having an artful pose even if it was just come upon by the photographer. And by the time of Iwo Jima, less than two years later, Jack Rosenthal had carefully posed the men who re-raised the American flag over Mount Suribachi.
In the years following World War II, war photography became less a source of information than of cliches about warfare, the audience supplying the information that made sense of the pictures rather than the pictures supplying that information. The photos become iconic of what happened rather than informing about the event, which is also true of Picasso’s “Guernica”, which imitates the black and white of photos to accomplish its effect which is to make you take flamboyant and grotesque images as realistic when they are not so, while Goya, in his “The Disasters of War” uses just a few strokes to make his victims grotesque and so beyond the immediate, a representation of cruelty in wartime rather than a report of a particular cruelty carried out during a war.
There are a number of ionic photos from the Vietnam War that can be used to distinguish photos that provide information, which is what most combat photographers think they are doing, from photos which supply basically an aesthetic experience. There is a shot of people lining up on top of one of the U. S. Embassy buildings to get on one of the last helicopters out of Saigon. They are lined up on a rickety ladder that goes up to a roof area large enough to accommodate a helicopter. The first bit of information that comes across is how jerry rigged are the arrangements to remove U. S. personnel. No better place could be found to land a helicopter. Second, it would have been very easy for people to lose their balance and fall off the ladder to their deaths. But the people seem engaged in a kind of military discipline, as befits Embassy personnel, and so patiently wait to be picked up. Either they will get away or else they won’t. That’s the breaks. The same sort of quiet heroism was also present at Dunkirk and on the Titanic.
A second informational photograph was of Marines on the attack at Hue during the Tet Offensive, out to recapture the city, which they did. They carry assault rifles while lined up behind a wall and so this is reminiscent of the nature of urban combat familiar from other wars but mostly not what happened in Vietnam, where the war was fought in villages and in the countryside. I believe that image was part of what drove Stanley Kubrick to depict urban warfare in “Full Metal Jacket” when Francis Ford Coppola had, in “Apocalypse Now” chosen to go with village and river warfare.
Then there are the photos that are aesthetic in nature and are among the best known of the war. There is the pre-pubescent girl running away naked from a napalm attack. The AP editor approved the photo despite the full frontal nudity. The issue, however, is that the photo shows the ravages of war but does not explain the circumstances of the photo. For that we would have to go elsewhere or depend on what we already know, which is that the United States did use napalm on civilian targets. Otherwise, this is a photo of the pain and anguish and fragile humanity of one child that can be blamed on God as well as on the United States Air Force. In that sense, it is an aesthetic rather than an informational photo.
Another photo of that sort is the one of a South Vietnamese police chief shooting an unarmed civilian who has been identified as a guerilla leader. Those attributions come from the text surrounding the picture, not from the picture itself, which is noteworthy because it is shocking to see someone pull the trigger that kills someone within the photo because it violates the American standard not to show people being shot. It makes the killing itself grisly, quite aside from the political motivations on the part of the shooter and his victim. So this is an aesthetic matter because it refers to practices in representation so as to increase emotional power by providing a new slant on shootings, one very different from “Gunfight at the OK Corral”.
That aesthetic use of war photography has continued ever since. The photo of a student staring down a tank in Tiananmen Square in takes on its power because it is a young man exuding bravery, like David taking on Goliath, and so providing a universal moral message caught up in a discrete image that combines bravery with fear of what comes next, or some frames away, when that tank or some other tank might crush this protestor or one of his ilk. As in all art, it is the moment the artist captures that is important, and at Tiananmen Square, it was the moment before the confrontation might have deteriorated into an atrocity. I can think of few recent informational uses of war photography, though an exception might have been the pictures of the families of the religious minority Yazidis caught in the not very high mountains of Iraq and exposed to slaughter by ISIS. Those photos may have prompted American military action to save them. They were not just there; they could be seen to be there, and so something had to be done about it and they were fortunate in that they were not already mutilated, as was the case with American Civil Rights workers in the South in the Fifties and Sixties, and so it was tasteful to present only photographs of their live and as yet undamaged bodies. Aesthetic considerations always come in even for photos that are clearly informational in nature.