Mathew Brady/NARA, via The Atlantic
The Vietnam War is often credited as the first conflict that was actually brought into the homes of American civilians. Graphic television reports, blooding images on black-and-white televisions…a lot has changed about the way we cover the war.
But this series in The Atlantic captured my attention and pointed it to the first American war where photographic images were even captured. Made me realize how, even though photography has changed, and war has changed, the images of war haven’t really changed at all.
Click through the photo tabs above and compare these photos–from the Library of Congress and the National Archives and Record Administration–of the Civil War to the photos you see everywhere in modern conflicts, in the Middle East, for example. The clothing is different, the technical details might have changed, but besides those peripherals, the photographs of war are fundamentally the same.
Erie as all hell. Is this a commentary on our human approach to photographing conflict? or is this a commentary on war? Neither or both?
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War photographers are the bravest people I can think of.
I wish images like these would teach us a lesson, but human history is very much a progression of more sofisticated way to destroy each other, with a few exceptions in between! Unfortunately, human evolution has been resiliant to the way we interactl among ourself! Wars are one of the things we do best and we had plenty of practice to show off! Documenting these events have a very little impact, we just have a very short memory!!
I think it’s a hybrid — it’s how a commentary on how we tell and perceive stories than how we photograph, specifically. A thousand years ago people went to the theater or a pub to hear a tale, today we turn on the TV or go to a movie theater. To your point, the tools we use to tell stories are different, the mediums are different but the stories are the same stories we’ve been telling for a thousand years. Each generation wrestles with the same issues its ancestors did, anew.
Every generation think that they invented sex. Every generation tries to come to terms with violence.
I don’t know if that’s a comfort or a sad commentary on how little we’ve progressed.
Agree with Fred above, the thing that has remained static throughout time is the emotion and what moves the photographer to snap the shutter in the first place.
war is war the weapons may change but the suffering and the emotion captured will be the same , if you found these interesting look at the photographs from Europe in ww2 , our chosen medium ” the camera” was pushed forward in design by the nazi need to document there conquest and cleansing . i think the imagery has a similar feel because the one unchanging factor is the photographer behind the camera its his/her choice what to point the lens at and the same emotion moves them to the same situations no matter what the time period.