Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/08/30
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]About war photography. > inability to capture on film the essence of what I was witnessing. > Words, though open to different interpretations by different people, at > least allowed me greater opportunity to explain was was happening, if > only to myself. Well said. IMHO that old statement that a picture is worth a thousand words is BS, especially in ACTION war photography. Words are a thousand times more effective. Witness the war poetry of Wilfred Owen (Anthem for Doomed Youth), Seigfreid Sassoon (They died in hell, they called it Passchendaele), Rupert Brooke (corner of a foreign field), Robert Graves, etc. I believe that war photography has its greatest impact when still scenes of the aftermath of an event are taken. The burned and wounded. The hollow eyed exhaustion of the survivors, the lines of body bags. They show the horrible result. The viewer of a "good" war photograph should either puke his guts out, be angry, or at least feel saddened. Then there are the famous and harmless photos such as the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima. The conference at Yalta(?) Battleships in line astern. More documentary than war I suppose. Alan