Альбом фотографий событий Второй мировой войны. I It was a photographer's war. To be sure, photographers had captured images of earlier conflicts, starling with blurred views of the US-Mexican war of 1846-8 and going on to show Roger Fenton's hirsute warriors in the Crimea and Matthew Brady's crumpled heroes of the American Civil War. But the limitations imposed by primitive technology meant that photographers were far better at revealing war's participants or combat's aftermath - some of the most striking photographs of the Civil War show sprawled dead, boots stolen and clothes bulging horribly - than they were at recording the face of battle. The development of the dry photographic plate in the 1870s removed some technical constraints, but photographs of the Anglo-Boer War and Russo-Japanese War retain many characteristics of earlier work, with self-conscious groups clustered round artillery pieces or a trench choked with dead on Spion Kop. One of the few "combat" shots of the Boer War, showing British troops assaulting a boulder-strewn kopje, is almost certainly posed. |
