by Warfare History Network
Here's What You Need to Know: Author Phillip Knightley best summed up the contributions of combat photographers and their role as vicarious witnesses for the rest of the world when he wrote, “Without the presence of the camera, the event would have meant nothing.”On the morning of February 23, 1945, on the tiny Pacific island of Iwo Jima, a 40-man patrol gathered at the 5th Marine Division headquarters for their final briefing with battalion commander Lt. Col. Chandler Johnson. The Marines had been given a dangerous assignment: Climb 554-foot high Mt. Suribachi, secure the summit, and hoist an American flag when the mission was successfully completed. For the past four days, the Leathernecks had fought a fanatical Japanese Army to seize the all-important mountain. From its peak one could view the entire island. It was imperative that the strategic location be captured quickly to prevent the enemy from shooting down at the advancing infantry heading north to seize the remainder of Iwo Jima.
Among the group that day was Staff Sgt. Louis R. Lowery, a photographer with Leatherneck Magazine. As the men began their ascent, Lowery snapped pictures to document the climb. Upon reaching the top, the Marines dispersed and quickly secured the area. Lowery took a picture of the flag raising and decided to go back down the mountain. As he was walking down, he met Joe Rosenthal, an Associated Press photographer. Lowery joked that he had already taken a picture of the flag raising. Rosenthal almost turned around and went back down the mountain, but decided against it. There would be great shots of the island from the top of Suribachi, he thought. He continued his climb.
When he got to the crest, Rosenthal saw that the Marines were going to put up a larger flag so that everyone on the island and offshore could get a better view of it. As the five Marines and one Navy corpsman struggled to raise the drainage pipe with the American flag attached to it, Rosenthal snapped a quick photograph. Unknown to him at that moment, he had just taken the greatest war photograph of all time. When it was published in the March 26, 1945, issue of Life magazine, Rosenthal’s photograph, bearing the caption, “The Raising of the Flag on Iwo Jima,” became an immediate icon of World War II. It was used on a postage stamp, in War Bond drives, and on 3.5 million posters. Later, it became the model for the 100-ton bronze monument to fallen Marines at Arlington National Cemetery.
Ironically, Rosenthal did not know initially which of the four photographs he took that morning on Mt. Suribachi the wire service would pick up. He had taken four photographs, in all, of the flag raising and of a group of Marines gathered around the flag after it was aloft. His film was shipped back to Guam for processing, and it was not until two days later, when he received a congratulatory wire from his editors, that Rosenthal realized that he had taken a memorable photograph—so memorable, in fact, that there were rumors the famous photograph had been posed. “It wouldn’t have been any disgrace at all to figure out a composition like that,” Rosenthal said. “But it just happened I didn’t. Good luck was with me, that’s all—the wind rippling the flag right, the men in fine positions, and the day clear enough to bring everything into sharp focus.”
“To Bring Everything into Sharp Focus”
In his own modest way, Rosenthal had given a good working description of combat photography, from its inception in the mid-19th century to the present day. Photographers following men at war must depend on their instincts, their technical skill, and a large portion of luck “to bring everything into sharp focus.” When all those elements combine, as they did for Rosenthal at Iwo Jima, the result is a photograph that simultaneously captures the stark reality of the moment while also achieving a mysterious alchemy that raises the image to a work of art and, occasionally, to a symbol for an entire war.
Almost from the time of their inception, photographs have played a huge role in depicting the stark realities of war. Images of death and destruction, taken by intrepid combat photographers such as Joe Rosenthal, have brought home the horrors of the battlefield to civilians in the United States and other nations. From time to time, certain photos have even shaped public opinion for or, in some cases, against a particular war. In doing so, such photographers have achieved what the late writer-philosopher Susan Sontag termed “the heroism of vision.”
Early War Photography
The first photograph was taken in 1827 by a Frenchman named Joseph Nicephore Niepce. He used material that would become hardened when exposed to light, a process that could take up to eight hours to develop. A few years later Niepce collaborated with Louis Daguerre, and the two of them began experimenting with ways to hasten the development process. After Niepce died in 1833, Daguerre continued his experiments. Finally, in 1839, he found a way to reduce the exposure time from eight hours to half an hour. The result of the new process, an image etched on a copper plate, came to be called a daguerreotype.
Armed with Daguerre’s improved invention, the first photographers set out to capture the essence of daily life. Their subjects—literally and figuratively—were normal people going about their unexceptional lives, and the results were formal, static photographs of people posing in their finest Sunday clothes in front of a device that poet Oliver Wendell Holmes called evocatively “the mirror with a memory.”
Inevitably, photographers began venturing outdoors to capture more natural scenes. One of the most natural of all human endeavors, unfortunately, is war, and photographers turned to the subject as eagerly as painters had done in the past. The earliest known daguerreotypes of war were taken during the Mexican War, from 1846 to 1848. The only one depicting actual movement, as opposed to studio shots of distinguished officers and obscure soldiers, shows a troop of American cavalry riding down a Mexican street. Another, taken in Exeter, N.H., shows a contingent of New Hampshire Volunteers, swords drawn, following their company band, presumably en route to the far-distant battlefield. Still another shows an American soldier surrounded by Mexican children on the streets of Saltillo.
The Crimean War: The First Photographed Conflict
It wasn’t until the Crimean War, a decade later, that a serious effort was made to photograph actual wartime events. An amateur photographer named Gilbert Elliott took a series of prints of the bulwarks surrounding Wingo Sound in the Baltic Sea (the whereabouts of the originals today are unknown). Another photographer, Richard Nicklin, also took numerous photographs. Unfortunately for Nicklin, his photographs, equipment, assistants, and himself were lost at sea when their boat sank after a hurricane tore through Balaclava Harbor on November 14, 1854.
Soon, many began to speak out against the costly and unnecessary war. Correspondents such as William Howard Russell of the London Times severely criticized the manner in which the war was being handled. Russell’s reports on the harsh life the soldiers had to endure in Balaclava aroused the sympathy and ire of the British public. It was then that Thomas Agnew of Thomas Agnew and Sons Publishing made a proposition to the British government. He offered to send someone to the Crimea to prove that Russell and other reporters were wrong in their condemnation of the war. He would provide photographs to support his point.
In 1855 Agnew sent Roger Fenton to the Crimea to photograph the war. Fenton, a failed painter and portrait photographer who had often photographed the royal family, chose not to take pictures of any scene that might upset the public. Armed with a letter of introduction from Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, Fenton traveled freely through the camps, concentrating on scenes of well-ordered military discipline and design and avoiding anything that might depict the war in a negative fashion. Fenton took many photographs, 360 in all, that showed smiling, well-dressed officers eating, drinking, and smoking in camp, while any scenes of actual squalor, death, and disease were strangely missing. Fenton managed to lie by omission—and sometimes by commission, as well. His most famous photograph, “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” showed what purported to be the site of the British cavalry’s famously gallant, if misbegotten, charge of the Light Brigade. Modern research has shown the site, a gully littered with spent cannonballs and scattered boulders, to have been a harmless gully near Sevastopol.
Ironically, Fenton did come upon the true site of the charge and graphic evidence of what the war was really like. In a letter home, the photographer described his findings: “We came upon many skeletons half buried. One was lying as if he had raised himself upon his elbow, the bare skull sticking up with still enough flesh left in the muscles to prevent it falling from the shoulders. Another man’s feet and hands were out of the ground, and shoes on the feet and the flesh gun.” Fenton did not even bother to unpack his camera. The public back home did not need to see such things, and the queen and prince might be displeased.
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