“Utter truth is essential and that is what stirs me when I look through the camera”. - Margaret Bourke-Whit
“ Essential truth” has been a much- debated factor of war photography and photojournalism since journalistic photography first became a genre. Photojournalism is seen as a type of documentation, a form of factual affirmation of history. However as pictures become less candid and more posed the argument arises asking when photojournalist images become less of a documentation photograph and more of a fine art piece . This is one topic explored by Susan Sontag in her essay “Regarding the Pain of Others”. Sontag explains that war photos are both factual and beautiful. She seems to believe that Photojournalism is both a fine art and a documentation of history all in one, there is beauty in the destruction and the misery that photographs capture. She defines beauty as emotion, something war photos evoke and display all at once. As Sontag says “Photographs that depict suffering shouldn’t be beautiful, as captions shouldn’t moralize. In this view, a beautiful photograph drains attention from the sobering subject and turns it toward the medium itself, thereby compromising the pictures status as a document. The photograph gives mixed signals. Stop this it urges. But also exclaims, What a spectacle!” (Sontag,258)
People rarely claim that War photographs are beautiful. This is because it is not seen as socially acceptable to call a war photo anything positive, these are photos of distress and havoc, war photography is of an ugly subject. Sontag explains this in a reference to the Ground Zero zone in New York City “The cite itself, the mass graveyard that had received the name “Ground Zero,” was of course anything but beautiful. Photographs tend to transform, whatever their subject; and as an image something may be beautiful –or terrifying, or unbearable, or quite bearable-as it is in real life” (528). But War photographs are beautiful in a way much different than the calendar art and school portraiture the average person views as beautiful. Sontag examines how the “sublime or awesome or tragic register of the beautiful”(259). But although the war – the subjects of the images – are not beautiful subjects they are still awe inspiring, they are still beautiful. Bourke-White took a photo in a Chinese concentration camp of a child being beheaded, this photo is so gruesome that it is impossible to look at and not feel raw emotions, not feel sadness. https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxKKfbib-qibXUx80zBMPcJIzZFLdX_wtnJ6W2eq32gmix0hrnXf3Wl-YGMUndiuSKVmETAHZZhSaGxAY13tn_dmJ4mX7kMNlwoqmKzyhyphenhyphenvbsw3Hx1Bb8gFu6B9nf7tY36WIdYsrytuxA/s400/99.jpeg
Yet that’s what war photography does it transforms the most gruesome of events into art. Emotions lead to beauty and this is shown through images like this one. Yes the event is documented, but mostly it is captured both in spirit and in physical being.
Beauty evokes emotion from its audience, makes them look again, intrigues them. “A landscape of devastation is still a landscape”(257) says Sontag, and this is true. When one looks at a war photo by a photographer like Margaret Bourke-White, they will see that these images are bombarded by multiple emotions. Feelings of shock, depression and terror are turned on by these images. There is beauty in these feelings, there is beauty in everything that is art, because the emotions spurred by it make is beautiful. Take for example Bourke- White’s image of a bomb storage facility, the shading and contrast make it beautiful but when one looks closer they see that these are bombs, provoking a sort of shock emotion, making the image even more beautiful.
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When beauty is looked at in this way it makes it hard to decipher what is a better documentation of the war, a photo that provokes the true feelings of that war, or a less provocative, candid shot of war. Yes, the posed shot of war may not be exactly what was happening at the time, it maybe dramatized by the photographer, however the emotion is raw, the feelings projected through these photos are true factual feelings. Sontag brings up the example of war photos from Nazi war camps: these photos were of piles of dead prisoners inside the barb wire fences. However she brings up, that in these camps most people were murdered through gas showers and then cremated. They were not piled up, these where the people who died from disease and starvation near the end of the camps’ history. However photographers like Margaret Bourke-White captured images of the piles of dead prisoners, and these became the staple photographs of the terrors of concentration camps. http://cache2.artprintimages.com/p/LRG/27/2762/OLETD00Z/art-print/margaret-bourke-white-burned-corpses-of-concentration-camp-prisoners-lay-near-barbed-wire-fence-of-number-3-erla-camp.jpg
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These photos may not be factual as to what all the concentration camps looked like while they were running, however they are factual in the amount of terror within the camp. As Sontag explains “they show the camps at the moment the allied troops marched in. What makes the images unbearable – the piles of corpses, the skeletal survivors – was not at all typical for the camps, which, when they were functioning, exterminated their inmates systematically (by gas, not starvation and illness) then immediately cremated them.” (261) If Bourke-White had chosen to take photos of the empty showers, or of the cremation dust of those lost in the “showers” the images would in fact be more factual, but they would not be nearly as affective, or as moving. The piles of the dead prisoners next to barb wire fences are so devastating; these images capture the feeling of the camps and show the mass genocide that occurred. Pile of corpses create an image, and effect that nothing else could. The feelings and terror of these camps are documented in Bourke-Whites photographs.
Margaret Bourke- White shows Sontag’s ideas through her photos. They are beautiful in that they create a shock factor that is obvious and evoke emotions like no other style of photography. Bourke-White took most of her photographs during The Second World War however to this day they evoke emotions of sadness, terror and shock. If beauty is emotion, then Bourke-White has fully captured Beauty through her art.

Posted by Shaz at 1:57 PM