A hundred years after the start of the Great War, the story of the conflict is being revisited and re-imagined around the globe as diaries, letters and other relics are discovered and retrieved.
At Sydney University the Macleay Museum is now showing selected Great War photography from its collection.
The photos are housed on the top floor in two display cases, which also contain a Vest Pocket Kodak (VPK) camera and an extraordinary looking 3D stereo-viewer.
Vest pocket camera
3D stereoviewer
Official, commercial or amateur soldier photographers all helped to document the war. But on the western front soldiers were banned from taking photos, and were ordered to send their cameras back home or hand them in. The VPK was a popular choice among those soldiers who chose to defy this order.
With press photographers also excluded, the official photographers had a monopoly on the western front. They generally saw their job as being to bolster morale and avoided photos of the dead or badly wounded.
In a talk this week the exhibition’s curator Jan Brazier spoke about the clash around verisimilitude. One celebrated disagreement took place between the official war correspondent Charles Bean and the legendary war photographer Frank Hurley.
Bean narrowly beat Keith Murdoch in the Australian Journalists’ Association nomination ballot and was elected as Australia’s first official war correspondent. He travelled to Egypt and later to Gallipoli. He was opposed to any kind of ‘faking’, protesting that he couldn’t depict something as having occurred if it hadn’t, even if by painting it that way he could “rouse the blood and make the pulse beat.”
Hurley served as an official photographer with the Australian forces during both wars. His practice involved the use of staged scenes, composites and photographic manipulation. This brought him into conflict with Bean.
Episode After Battle_of_Zonnebeke_1918_Frank Hurley. An example of a composite image.
http://commons.wikimedia.org
Hurley’s diaries document how he had a lengthy argument with Bean about ‘combination pictures’. He complained bitterly that the authorities would not let him pose pictures or allow composite printing of any description “even though such be accurately titled”. Hurley resigned in protest – albeit only temporarily – stating that he could only illustrate how the war was conducted by “printing a result from a number of negatives or re-enactment”.
This enlightening animation shows the creation of Hurley’s iconic composite image.
Other Hurley images to be found in the exhibition include Attending the wounded in an advance addressing station and Registering up a batter of Australian heavies.
Attending the wounded in an advanced dressing station. Frank Hurley. State Library of NSW
Registering up a batter of australian heavies, Frank Hurley,
http://www.greatwar.nl
Robert Dixon has argued that Hurley’s stage and screen practice “offers an insight into Australia’s engagement with the romance and wonder of international modernity in the early years of the twentieth century”. The same could be argued for his photography.
The exhibition is open Monday- Friday, 10:00 to 16:30 (except public holidays and university holidays) and Saturday 10:00 to 16:00 (first Saturday of every month only, 12-4pm.)
Story by Sue McCreadie
SydneyCubed 