Steve Mumford, Sgt Jack Hennessy’s Memorial Service, FOB Independence, Steve Mumford, Kids’ Soccer League, Baghdad, June 2004 (2004), ink and
Baghdad, October 2004 (2004), ink and watercolour on paper, 29 x 37 cm watercolour on paper, 29 x 37 cm
His aim might have been to conjure up
an evenhanded account of history,
but Mumford’s watercolours only succeed in
taking the sting out of a grim reality
in something inherent to that rival medium, photography, and what it Civil War onwards, would come to be the hallmark of so much war
can and cannot say about war. photography. Yet somehow this quiet, bleak picture evokes the tragedy
War photography began 150 years ago in the Crimea when of conflict in a way that more overtly traumatic images cannot.
Roger Fenton, sometime photographer to the British royal family, Today we take it as given that, overloaded with images of
travelled to the peninsula to produce a document of the allied suffering, we can no longer be easily moved by them. But Fenton’s
campaign. Reports in The Times suggested that official incompetence early sideways glance at death might provide a clue to a much more
had resulted in unnecessary deaths and terrible suffering among the fundamental obstacle that has always prevented us from fully grasping
British troops. But instead of corroborating either these accounts or what the most harrowing of photographs portray.
the horrors that, according to his letters home, he himself witnessed, If, either as the propaganda tool of power or as a witness for
Fenton concocted a sanitised version of events. the defence, all war art aspires to a sort of empiricism, then the advent
In part this could be put down to his social position. His first diary of photography upped the stakes. When we look at a photograph we
entry records settling down to a bottle of champagne and a box of instinctively – and no doubt naively – believe that it neither tampers
cigars on the hills where the officers were camped as a battle raged with reality nor conceals anything, at least within the constraints of a
below. Fenton belonged to a class for whom war was a spectacle and given point of view. Yet while such a document promises to show us
art its celebration. And his portraits of off-duty officers or his anodyne ‘everything’, its brute facticity may also, in some instances, prevent us
behind-the-lines camp scenes that constitute the majority of his from actually registering what the picture contains.
Crimea output simply followed in a long tradition of depicting conflict A photograph of a corpse confronts us with an untreated image
as an orderly, valiant affair. of death. And in front of this ultimate trauma we are left with nothing to
Still, historians have criticised him for his failure to enter into the say. We may respond with disgust or denial or just hardened indifference.
suffering that was all around. But perhaps these pictures that announced We may try to sublimate what we see by anointing it as art. But in the
the inception of war photography intuited something about the limits end death, as the impossible limit that lies outside all experience, blocks
of the genre. Fenton’s most affecting Crimea image is The Valley of every meaning. Unimaginable and incomprehensible, it can never be
the Shadow of Death (1855). Empty save for a few dozen cannonballs assimilated into human consciousness.
strewn across the scree, this view of the aftermath of the battle When you think of the great war photographs, those which have
commemorated by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in The Charge of the Light imprinted themselves on our collective memory, they do not show
Brigade (1854) contains none of the corpses that, from the American death head-on. Take Huynh Cong Ut’s picture of a girl running from
p062-066 War AR Jul07.indd 65 5/6/07 12:22:35
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