First World War Photography

Jane Carmichael

Photography at the Outbreak of War

In our contemporary world we are bombarded with a stream of images; they might be still pictures or moving film, realistic colour or manipulated fantasy, professionally produced or amateur generated, but we take them for granted as part of our daily life and engagement with the world. Most we regard as essentially ephemeral, only a selection remain in our memory as carrying extra significance for personal or more general reasons.

One hundred years ago at the outbreak of the First World War in July 1914 the position was very different; there were far fewer images available and they were mostly still black and white. Photography had only just become truly accessible to the amateur via the invention in 1888 of the first small Kodak camera to take roll film. The professional still preferred the clarity and definition of the glass plate negative. Neither format allowed for fast multiple exposures and prints had to be produced by skilled work with chemicals in a darkroom.

Newspapers and magazines were illustrated with line drawings and artistic engravings in black and white supported by columns and pages of solid text. The invention of the half tone process of reproduction in the 1880s allowed photographs to be successfully reproduced. However the press industry’s innate conservatism meant that the illustrated dailies such as the Daily Mirror were seen as downmarket and the broadsheet upper end of the market, such as The Times, remained resolutely wedded to its format of mostly solid text. The photograph was most often used to illustrate the comings and goings of an aristocratic society and its political élite rather than a means of reporting or investigating contemporary events.