page_title: War photography
section_title: Further development
hierarchical_section_title: War photography / History / Further development
context_page_description: War photography involves photographing armed conflict and its effects on people and places. Photographers who participate in this genre may find themselves placed in harm's way, and are sometimes killed trying to get their pictures out of the war arena.
context_section_description: Fenton left the Crimea in 1855, and was replaced by the partnership of James Robertson and Felice Beato. In contrast to Fenton's depiction of the dignified aspects of war, Beato and Robertson showed the destruction. They photographed the fall of Sevastopol in September 1855, producing about 60 images.
  In February 1858, they arrived in Calcutta to document the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. During this time they produced possibly the first-ever photographic images of corpses. It is believed that for at least one of the photographs taken at the palace of Sikandar Bagh in Lucknow, the skeletal remains of Indian rebels were disinterred or rearranged to heighten the photograph's dramatic impact.
  In 1860 Beato left the partnership and documented the progress of the Anglo-French campaign during the Second Opium War. Teaming up with Charles Wirgman, a correspondent for The Illustrated London News, he accompanied the attack force travelling north to the Taku Forts. Beato's photographs of the Second Opium War were the first to document a military campaign as it unfolded, doing so through a sequence of dated and related images. His photographs of the Taku Forts formed a narrative recreation of the battle, showing the approach to the forts, the effects of bombardments on the exterior walls and fortifications, and finally the devastation within the forts, including the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers.
  During the American Civil War, Haley Sims and Alexander Gardner began recreating scenes of battle in order to overcome the limitations of early photography with regard to the recording of moving objects. Their reconfigured scenes were designed to intensify the visual and emotional effects of battle.
  Gardner and Mathew Brady rearranged bodies of dead soldiers during the Civil War in order to create a clear picture of the atrocities associated with battle. In Soldiers on the Battlefield, Brady produced a controversial tableau of the dead within a desolate landscape. This work, along with Alexander Gardner's 1863 work, Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, were images which, when shown to the public, brought home the horrific reality of war.
  Also during the Civil War, George S. Cook captured what is likely and sometimes believed to be the world's first photographs of actual combat, during the Union bombardment of Confederate fortifications near Charleston – his wet-plate photographs taken under fire show explosions and Union ships firing at southern positions September 8, 1863. By coincidence, northern photographers Haas and Peale made a photographic plate of USS New Ironsides in combat September 7, 1863.
  The most lethal war in South American history was the Paraguayan War of 1865–1870. It was also the first occasion for South American war photography. In June 1866, the Montevideo firm of Bate y Compañía commissioned the Uruguayan photographer Javier López to travel to the field of battle.
  López used the wet-plate collodion process, making and developing his plates in a portable darkroom. The plates were sensitive to blue light only; his darkroom was an orange tent. This was the first time photography had covered South American warfare and his images became iconic. The firm did send a photographer to cover the Siege of Paysandú the year before, but he arrived after the fighting was over. He captured images of the ruined town and corpses in a street.
  The Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878–1880 was photographed by John Burke who traveled with the British forces. This was a commercial venture with the hope of selling albums of war photographs.
caption: Interior of Fort Taku, 1860, by Felice Beato
exif: {}