31 August - 31 October 2008
Photographing the First World War
Frank Hurley
An exhibition of Frank Hurley's extraordinary images of the First World War, exhibited as part of 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial.
Renowned in his native Australia, Frank Hurley’s photography should be more widely known. He was a brilliant technician, extraordinarily brave and physically hardy. He plunged into Antarctic waters to retrieve negatives lost to the sea during his trip with Shackleton. Above all, he was a photographer capable of producing finely considered compositions in highly dangerous circumstances. His First World War pictures have a modern air that stand out from the usual stock of images of that time.
While photojournalism as we know it was born with the portable Leica and Rolleiflex cameras, Hurley worked with bulky, slow single-shot cameras and slow film. Nevertheless, he was able to capture not only the life of the trenches and the devastated towns of the front, but also bunker scenes and combat pictures.
The war presented novel difficulties of representation even to painters and graphic artists. Far from the mobile massed troops and brightly coloured uniforms of previous wars, this was a camouflaged war of position in which some of the most important elements—flying bullets and shells, gas—were hard to discern.
Hurley’s frustration at risking his life continually to get pictures that did not fully represent the scenes that he saw led him to the highly controversial practice of montaging his photographs to create composite battle scenes. These montages, Hurley claimed, told a more complete truth about the war than his straight images. Hurley’s work casts an extraordinary historical illumination over current scepticism about perfectly realised photojournalistic images.
Photoworks collaborated with Julian Stallabrass, curator of the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial, to produce the exhibition at the Charleston Farmhouse gallery.
In partnership with the Brighton Photo Biennial 2008
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