The great age of the war photographer is over. It’s been superseded by technology, muted by the decline of print media, and rendered ineffective by the endless stream of graphic images we’ve been exposed to, not only on the nightly news and through social media, but also in movies and video games. There was a time, more than half a century ago, when network television executives banned grisly images from news broadcasts. The public they sought to protect is now inured to whatever it was they sought to hide.
The American war in Vietnam was the turning point. At no time since then has the camera been as powerful. Cameras that were cumbersome to carry and awkward to adjust a decade or two before Vietnam became smaller and easier to use. The single-lens reflex camera (SLR), pioneered by Japanese manufacturers, let its users frame images more accurately than its twin-lens and rangefinder predecessors. It also made possible the development of through-the-lens metering: no longer did the photographer have to fumble with a light meter before setting aperture and shutter speed. And then Nikon made available an astonishing range of lenses, from fish-eye and wide-angle to telephoto and zoom. One lens could be substituted for another in seconds on the same camera body according to need. Subjects that once were far away filled the frame.
Film changed too. Color film was introduced before the Second World War ended but it was slow, that is, it worked well only in brightly lit conditions, and it was well-nigh impossible to process in the field. That began to change in the 1960s. Meanwhile, black-and-white film became much more flexible. Kodak Tri-X could be used in dim light and was forgiving even when processed in improvised conditions. It became the go-to front-line film throughout the war.
The often startling and dramatic images these cameras and films made possible had an outlet in widely-read media. Life magazine, published weekly in the 1960s, had a circulation of more than thirteen million (its readership was several times as many). It wasn’t the only picture magazine. Its sister publication, Time, and its competitor, Newsweek, although smaller and text-heavy, were also well-illustrated. Look and Saturday Evening Post in the United States, Paris Match in France and, when Harold Evans was editor, the Sunday Times Magazine in England were among other outlets eager to print (and pay generously for) photographs taken on the battlefield.
There was a market for war photographers’ work and their pictures had impact – they changed how people thought about the war. Malcolm Browne’s photograph of an elderly monk engulfed in flames on a Saigon street landed on President Kennedy’s desk, inspiring him to demand that something be done: the publicity threatened to discredit both South Vietnam’s administration and his own. Other pictures in the years that followed brought home the grim reality of American involvement: a farmer holding up the corpse of his infant son before the careless gaze of soldiers in an armoured personnel carrier; a snarling Vietnamese soldier pressing a knife into the midsection of a Vietcong prisoner; a dozen bodies of enemy soldiers laid out on the muddy bank of a river; a GI cradling in his arms a dying comrade. A handful of pictures transcended Vietnam to convey indelibly the awfulness of all wars: Don McCullin’s portrait of a shell-shocked Marine staring blankly into the camera’s lens – the thousand-yard stare; Nick Ut’s snap of a naked girl, her skin seared by napalm, running with others toward the photographer; Eddie Adam’s picture of Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner in February 1968. All remain a part of our collective memory. These pictures mattered.
Which brings me to the peculiar portrayal of war photographers in the just-released film, Civil War.
The film is a coming-of-age story told in the form of a journey, set against the background of a contemporary America torn apart by civil war. The lead characters are Lee, a battle-hardened war photographer played by Kirsten Dunst, and Jesse, a young aspirant to the trade played by Cailee Spaeny. There are two main supporting characters, both reporters rather than photographers: Joel (Wagner Moura) and Sammy (Stephen Henderson). Together they see a lot of action as they make the perilous trip from New York to Washington DC. Lee turns out to be a reluctant but caring mentor to Jesse. Jesse turns out to be a quick learner. So far, so good.
But there are oddities. Lee is explicitly modeled on Lee Miller, a photographer from an earlier era. Jesse uses an old Nikon F2 SLR – a film camera – apparently with a single 50mm lens. Why?
Lee Miller studied art in New York before being discovered by Conde Nast, the publisher of Vogue (he saved her from being run over in traffic, or so the story goes). The encounter propelled her into an association with the magazine, first as a model and then as a photographer. When the Second World War started, Vogue sent her overseas: she covered the London Blitz and later, after the Normandy invasion, she took affecting pictures in military hospitals, of doctors and nurses at work on wounded soldiers. She witnessed the liberation of Paris and hung out with other correspondents at the Hotel Scribe. Women reporters were barred from the front lines – Miller was no exception – but she followed rear-echelon forces into Germany. She took pictures of the liberation of Dachau concentration camp. And memorably, another photographer, David Scherman, took a picture of her in the bathtub of Hitler’s apartment, coincidentally on the day Hitler committed suicide. The moment is referenced in Civil War when Lee is glimpsed in a hotel tub.
But there was much more to Lee Miller. She was exotic, unique, unreasonably beautiful. She was photographed by Edward Steichen, painted by Picasso. She was muse to the surrealist Man Ray: some of his work was almost certainly hers. She ended up living on an estate in England as Lady Penrose, married to a lord. She was an artist who took fine pictures with a camera. She was not, however, a battle-hardened, front-line war photographer. What part of her life does Lee, in the film, seek to emulate? It’s unclear.
And then there’s Jesse. What market does she imagine exists today for black-and-white images taken using an antique camera? How will she even get her pictures to a publisher, assuming she can find one? After developing the film, she’ll need to make prints, which will then have to be scanned before they can be uploaded. Daft. She’s risking her life to take snaps many of which – as the film itself acknowledges – fail because the settings are wrong. They’re over- or under-exposed. The shutter speed’s too fast or slow. Handling that old camera under pressure takes practice. She’d get better results with her phone.
There are photographers in battle zones today. We see their work sometimes in television news broadcasts but mainly online. Most of us would be hard-pressed to remember a single still image of war from the last decade, whatever the source, that carried the emotional weight of pictures taken in Vietnam. Goodness knows, it’s not for lack of a war. Nor is there a dearth of talented photographers - the opposite is true. But even the most brilliant photographs vanish into the ether almost as soon as they’re made. Increasingly, our impression of what’s happening in Gaza and the Ukraine come from snippets of video, mostly shot by amateurs with iPhones, who happen to be in the right (wrong) spot at the right (wrong) time. Some are taken by soldiers. TikTok and Instagram occupy the place where once there were magazines.
Lee, Jesse, Joel and Sammy are meant to stand in for the journalists who continue courageously to cover wars that might otherwise go unreported. The correspondents deserve our admiration and gratitude. Their work is incredibly valuable. But photo-journalists may be irrelevant. These days nothing goes unseen.
(Civil War, by the way, is a pretty good film.)
Civil War (2024), written and directed by Alex Garland.
Thanks, Ken. I quite liked the film, despite my quibbles. I thought it was smart not to be too explicit about the causes - there are so many ways a civil war might come about. And the sense in the movie that you never quite knew what was around the corner or what was happening struck me as the way civil strife might be experienced. Granted, the idea that California and Texas could come together as allies is a helluva stretch. I'm thinking of coming back to this.
Since I know next to nothing about cameras or photo-journalism, I find your insights and breadth of knowledge remarkable. Thanks for that, Jonathan! For me, the film was hugely disappointing. Just bang, bang, bang. I was anticipating something about how and why. . . . but nothing. No intellectual engagement whatsoever, no rationale or explanation about how the country had come to this, just two ill-defined sides running, shooting guns, and exploding bombs. Stinker!