Thierry Gervais, Witness to War: The Uses of Photography in the Illustrated Press, 1855-1904

Thierry Gervais, “Witness to War: The Uses of Photography in the Illustrated Press, 1855-1904,” Journal of Visual Culture, 9 (December 2010), 370-384.

In the 1840s, the advent of the illustrated press “changed the way in which war was represented, as well as “made these representations more accessible to the public.” (370—1) Since then visual narratives of the warfare are consumed with “readers <sitting> comfortably in their chairs with The Illustrated London News or L’Illustration in hand.” (371) And then came photography, which should have made a fast entry into the illustrated press, as the latter “strove towards impartial reporting.” (371) Should have, but did not: “an analysis of war images in the 19th-century press actually reveals a certain resistance to the new medium of photography.” (371)

Gervais then states that his aim is to look at how war photographs were used in the illustrated press, as such analysis “informs us of the choices made regarding the documentation of the war and the nature of the images that circulated in the public sphere, shaping the visual culture of the era,” (371) using the Crimean War and the Russo-Japanese War as two case studies.

Crimean War

Photographs of the English photographer Roger Fenton became, according to Gervais, a first renowned and extended photographic account of warfare. Moreover, Fenton employed a new journalistic strategy, “reportage,” as he “placed himself in the field and was an eyewitness to the battles.” (372) Yet Gervais argues that he did not manage to create a new photographic genre: his visual representations—groups of officers, landescapes, etc.—as well as the overall organization of his trip (he was not sent by a newspaper, but rather was funded by a publisher and art dealer) did not create a new photographic genre. Even the distribution of these photographs was not mass: they were available only to “a small circle of collectors.” (372) Although newspapers used his photographs, lack of proper technology forced them to use engraving to depict them in print; therefore, they hardly heralded a new era of visual mass media. Not only original photos were engraved technically, but engravers also could “correct” them to make “better. (372) Therefore, although “the illustrated press quickly took advantage of the variety of photographic genres available,” they were used “in a manner that rendered them indistinguishable from any other type of pictorial representation.” (373) Photographs did not yet change the format of the presentation of news.

And even though Fenton travelled throughout the Crimea, contemporary newspapers still favored pictures of war, which “met the iconographic expectations of readers,” over the “new –born photography.” (375) Actually, it was not photography which changed the attitude of the contemporary British society to the war, but sketches: “Guys’ rough sketches brought new life to the visual evidence of the war,” while “Fenton’s photographs registered themselves within traditional iconography by conforming to the rules of the picturesque.” (375)

The Russo-Japanese Conflict

Half a century later, the situation was completely different, as new technologies allowed reproduction of photos in newspapers, and their editors “definitively accepted photo-reportage as a mode of journalism.” (376) “Adopting photography as the primary illustrative form engendered a deep shift in the structures upon which the paper <the French journal L’Illustration, a pioneer journal to make the main emphasis on photographs, rather than on pictures> had functioned for decades.” (376) As photographs were now sent from military fronts directly, a figure of a war correspondent becomes heroic. New technologies and a danger to a journalist’s life “served to legitimize the use of photographs in newspapers and led to a modification of representations of war.” (376)

Wide use of photographs forces editors to invent a new form of their representation: a sequential row. “The images and their order on the page conferred the status of war spectator upon the reader, and emphasized its ongoing process.” (378) A certain narrative is constructed by the sequence of photographic images with captions, to create a story. As the result, the way a war was now described, “that very noble subject of historical painting was no longer represented in a single heroic composition, but in a sequence of details <…> During the Russo–Japanese War, the illustrator’s synthetic tableaux of battles made way for an analytical layout of Jimmy Hare’s photographs, one created by editors who took into consideration the methods and styles of the medium.” (381) “The story of war was no longer told through one large, dramatic, and well-composed drawing, but through a photographic sequence constructed on the page.” (381)

The author concludes that as in the course of the nineteenth century photography was credited with more authenticity and better accuracy than journalistic writing, it came to dominate in the press over other forms of visual representation. Yet, as contemporary editors believed, this "medium, on its own, was not deemed sufficient in transmitting the news, and that it needed to become a part of an elaborate graphic construction." (382) Meaning was expressed through creation of narrative layouts. Therefore, visual representations of wars were, as before, completely in hands of editors (and he did not mention at all such an important aspect of it as pre-selection of images).