Contact, Photographs from the Australian War Memorial Collection is a powerful collection of some 200 images drawn from The Australian War Memorial’s collection of 900,000 photographs of Australians at war. Written and assembled by the AWM’s Curator of Photographs, Dr Shaune Lakin, Contact is not just another collection of stodgy official war photographs. Instead it sets out to illustrate how photography was used both to record and portray Australians at war.
Dili-Street475
Dili Street 1999. Stephen Dupont.
Arranged in roughly chronological order, the story begins with a photograph taken in front of Sydney’s Victoria Barracks on 24 May, 1861 by Major Thomas Wingate. His subject was a company of men from the 1st Regiment, New South Wales Rifle Volunteers, on the occasion of the presentation of their new colours. It’s a somewhat unremarkable image in many respects – just a group of young men, standing stiffly in their brand new uniforms on a sunny Sydney morning almost a century and a half ago.
Forty years would pass before Australia had its first official war photographer. And as a consequnce, all the Australian military pictures we have from the 19th century were taken either by amateurs or commercial photographers.
Photographic technology evolved very quickly in the 20 or so years following Wingate’s shot of the volunteers at Victoria Barracks. As heavy glass plates gave way to roll film, picture taking rapidly became a popular hobby. By the time Australians were setting off to join the war in South Africa, the Rochester Optical company was advertising its Premo A model ‘as the ideal camera for the “Transvaal War”.’
Although military authorities gradually reduced the number of cameras in unapproved hands, the official war photographers weren’t the only ones taking pictures. Many images we have from World War I were taken by ordinary soldiers and by World War II there were documentary photographers working along with the official photographers.
Lakin’s text and image selection also show how quickly the propaganda value of photographic images came to be understood by leadership. His essay also traces developments in the technology of mass media that underpinned the growing power of the photograph (eg, the arrival of the halftone technique for reproducing photographs in newspapers and magazines). Photography and picture-taking, as Lakin shows, profoundly shaped civilians’ and soldiers’ attitude toward warfare itself. The images selected for this beautifully-printed volume include many with which readers will already be familiar. But it seems to me that Lakin has made an effort to choose images that in some way hint at, or overtly illustrate, the inherently democratic nature of photography. For every grand and heroic iconic image, there are a dozen more that capture the weird mixture of tedium, fear and exhaustion that is warfare. These are photographs on a human scale and I think taken as a whole, give an honest and respectful – but not reverential – picture of Australians at war.
Contact, Photographs from the Australian War Memorial Collection by Shaune Lakin.
Published by the Australian War Memorial.
Available at the War Memorial Shop or online from http://www.awm.gov.au/ RRP $49.95 softcover, $79.95 hardcover. 300 pages.
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