IN 1854 A 35-year-old Briton called Roger Fenton was commissioned to photograph the Crimean war, perhaps to help convince people at home that the campaign was worthy. His sepia pictures feature tableaux of bewhiskered men in uniform holding themselves very, very still.
Fenton is reputed to have been the first war photographer. Today, just across the water from Crimea, you can find the men and women who followed him into what has become the most dangerous job in all journalism today. They are hard at work, covering what is fast becoming a brutal war of urban destruction.
War photography matters today for the same reason it mattered in 1854: it makes a link between those safe at home and those stuck in the hell of conflict. That emotional connection is why it has produced so many memorable images.
By now, in our second issue devoted to Vladimir Putin’s calamitous invasion of Ukraine, we had expected to have featured an example of their work on our cover. Yet once again this week we opted for another design—as we have throughout the build-up to war. It is worth asking why.
War creates destruction on a scale beyond most people’s comprehension. One reason to use a photograph is to depict it. Here is an earth-shattering blast in Kyiv and the wreckage after a missile hit a local-government building in Freedom Square in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city.
A war picture has to land an emotional punch. But these images cannot compete with moving pictures set to loud music on huge screens, or with the grainy immediacy of clips on your phone.
Photography has also become commoditised. If you include smartphone images, the invasion of Ukraine may already be the most photographed war in history. Now that individual pictures have so much less novelty value, it is hard for the work of war photographers to stand out.
One way to deal with this is to make a cover photograph distinctive by adding a filter. The simplest is black and white. By taking away the colour, you ask the observer to look more closely at the composition of the image, here a woman and a child in Kyiv. We also have a block of flats in the capital that was hit by a Russian rocket early in the war. The detail of the picture has become a texture against which to set the type. The picture itself has almost been lost.
A better way to have impact is to focus on a detail that everyone can grasp and which stands for the war as a whole. This woman, bloodied, but with an enigmatic smile, is standing in front of the ruins of an apartment block in Chuhuiv, near Kharkiv. No wonder many picture editors put her on the front page of the world’s papers. However, when we came to this photograph a few days later, it was already too familiar for us to use.
Here is the idea taken to an extreme. All you see is a pair of moccasined feet poking from under a grubby blanket. Your head fills in all the details—that this woman is dead, that she is Ukrainian and that she was killed by a Russian strike.
It is desperate and poignant. And it is a powerful denunciation of war. But it does not fit: this woman sums up the horror today, but we are looking at the horror ahead.
Eventually, we will find a picture for our cover. However, although many photographs are being taken, spotting the right one could turn out to be surprisingly hard.
And so we came back to the Ukrainian flag, which we have thought about using several times in past weeks. Because the blue represents the sky and the yellow wheat, the boundary between them is the horizon. As the week drew on, it was increasingly clear that the country’s cities risked being pounded with bombs and artillery-fire. So we put one on the flag and watched it bleed.
The impulse to strip away detail can transform designs as well as photographs. Here we have removed the city. For the final image we also scrapped the title and flashes—the type in the upper right that promotes stories in the issue. Each time we took something away from the design, it became stronger. All that was left was the suffering.
Our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis can be found here.