War photography War photography captures photographs of armed conflict and life in war - torn areas . Although photographs can provide a more direct representation than paintings or drawing s , they are sometimes manipulated , creating an image that is not objectively journalistic . History . Photography , presented to the public in 1839 , was believed to create images that were accurate representations of the world . Photography was used to record historical information , but not always in the optimistic way that was conceived at the advent of the medium . It was anticipated that photographers , supposedly not acting as active participants of war but as neutral partisan , would be able to bring their cumbersome photographic equipment into the battlefield and record the rapid action of combat . This was not the case , as the technical insufficiency of the photograph in recording movement was not considered . The daguerreotype , an early form of photography that generated a single image using a silver - coated copper plate , took a very long time to produce . This prevented action photography , as images took minutes to develop and could not be processed immediately . The first war photographer was an anonymous American who took a number of daguerrotypes during the Mexican – American War , in 1847 , of the occupation of Saltillo . The first known war photographer is the Hungarian - Romanian Carol Popp de Szathmàri who took photos of various officers in 1853 and of war scenes near Olteniţa and Silistra in 1854 , during the Crimean War . He created some 200 pictures albums , which he personally offered in 1855 to Napoleon III of France and Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom . About nine of his pictures survive today The French photographer Ernest Edouard de Caranza caught his countrymen in their camp near Varna , in 1854 . He was followed by Roger Fenton , in 1855 , although with his bulky equipment he was limited to posed still photographs or landscapes . He took a large van and an assistant , and returned to Britain with over 350 usable large format negatives . In the late 1850s , Felice Beato traveled to India to photograph scenes from the recent mutiny , and produced a number of images of the Siege of Lucknow and the Siege of Delhi . Shortly thereafter , he went to China to record the aftermath of the Second Opium War . The inability of the early photograph to record a moving object lead to the practice of recreating scenes of battle , such as in the work of both Haley Sims and Alexander Gardner . They admittedly reconfigured scenes that took place during the American Civil War ( 1861 – 65 ) in order to intensify the visual and emotional effects of battle . Alexander 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 " , 1862 , Brady produced a controversial tableau of the dead within a desolate landscape . This work , along with Alexander Gardner ’ s 1863 work were images , which , when shown to the public , brought home the horrific reality of war . The Second Anglo - Afghan War of 1878 – 80 was photographed by John Burke who traveled with the Anglo - British forces . This was a commercial venture with the hope of selling albums of war photographs . Since early photographers were not able to create images of moving targets , they would record more sedentary aspects of war , such as fortifications , soldiers , and land before and after battle along with the re - creation of action scenes . Similar to battle photography , portrait images of soldiers were also often staged . In order to produce a photograph , the subject had to be perfectly still for a matter of minutes , so they were posed to be comfortable and minimize movement . In the 20th century , photographers covered all the major conflicts , and many were killed as a consequence . One of the most famous was Robert Capa who covered the Spanish Civil War , the D - Day landings and the fall of Paris , and conflicts in the 1950s until his death by a landmine in Indochina in May 1954 . The famous photograph of the flag - raising on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima in 1945 was taken by photojournalist , Joe Rosenthal . Photojournalists continue to cover conflicts around the world . Unlike paintings , which presented a single illustration of a specific event , photography offered the opportunity for an extensive amount of images to enter circulation . The proliferation of the photographic images allowed the public to be well informed in the discourses of war . The advent of mass - reproduced images of war were not only used to inform the public but they served as imprints of the time and as historical recordings . Mass - produced images did have consequences . Besides informing the public , the glut of images in distribution over - saturated the market , allowing viewers to develop the ability to disregard the immediate value and historical importance of certain photographs . War photographers . 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 . Journalists and photographers are protected by international conventions of armed warfare , but history shows that they are often considered targets by warring groups — sometimes to show hatred of their opponents and other times to prevent the facts shown in the photographs from being known . War photography has become more dangerous with the terrorist style of armed conflict as some terrorists target journalists and photographers . In the Iraq War , 36 photographers and camera operators have been abducted or killed during the conflict from 2003 - 2009 Several have been killed by US fire ; two Iraqi journalists working for Reuters were notably strafed by a helicopter during the July 12 , 2007 Baghdad airstrike , yielding a scandal when Wikileaks published the video of the gun camera . War photographers need not necessarily work near active fighting ; instead they may document the aftermath of conflict . The German photographer Frauke Eigen created a photographic exhibition about war crimes in Kosovo which focused on the clothing and belongings of the victims of ethnic cleansing , rather than on their corpses . Eigen ' s photographs were taken during the exhumation of mass graves , and were later used as evidence by the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague .