ABSTRACT
By the 1930s, improved camera technology enabled photographers to capture motion and work faster and closer to the action, transforming depictions of armed conflict. Press circulation of these images formed a new visual language for the horror - and humanity - of war. Capa's images of the 1944 Normandy landings, published in Life, showed blurred action that demonstrated how close photographers could now come to their subjects. They had greater access to the horrors of war, as seen in Dmitri Baltermants's and Galina Sanko's images of corpses and suffering civilians on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. The chaos and futility of the Vietnam conflict and its coincidence with Postmodernist thought on the reliability of documentary imagery also resulted in new forms of reportage: McCullin, Larry Burrows, David Douglas Duncan and Philip Jones Griffiths were among those who demonstrated a new awareness of the influence of composition, text and context on photographic narratives.
