With 2014 marking the centennial of the beginning of World War I, some amazing journalism, archive curation, and multimedia storytelling has been produced about the Great War, which began July 28, 1914, and ended with an armistice on November 11, 1918, after more than 16 million combatant and civilian deaths. The conflict was truly global and resulted in drastic changes in the geography of Europe and southwest Asia and set the conditions for the next world conflict 20 years later.
As our own act of remembrance, I think an occasional post about World War I would be in order as a way to compare how much or little has changed in the last 100 years, and to remember a war that has, one could argue, influenced our lives in less obvious but more significant ways than any other modern conflict.
So here are a couple photos of photographers (the second is of aerial photographers) from the Great War. Much has changed both in technological advancements and uses (and usefulness) of military photographers and public affairs soldiers, not the least of which is the equipment we now use. As photographers and videographers we carry around extra gear, but nothing as bulky and cumbersome as what these early war photographers had to muscle around the battle field.
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| American and French photographic staff, France, 1917. (U.S. National Archives/Harry Kidd) |
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| 14th Photo Section, 1st Army, "The Balloonatic Section". Capt. A. W. Stevens (center, front row) and personnel. Ca. 1918. Air Service Photographic Section. (Army Air Forces) |
Compare the cameras in the above photos with the Nikon carried by Spc. Ariel Solomon, who has served in Afghanistan these last five months or so as the command photographer, taking thousands of photos and uploading them in minutes to web-based shared drives. I wonder what any of the photographers would say if they could see how far the combat photography field has come in the last 100 years?
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