Earliest War Photography From Afghanistan
Photographing the war in Afghanistan is hard enough as it is. But imagine doing it with a huge view camera, lugging around a darkroom and fragile glass plates — and protecting those plates from gusts of dusty wind.
"I think it's absolutely unbelievable," says Matthew Butson, vice president of Getty Images' Hulton Archive. In the 1880s, the men documenting wars weren't just photographers. In Butson's words, "They were explorers, they were weightlifters, they were chemists, they were scientists, they were artists. They were everything all in one."
Butson oversees an unimaginably large photography archive, and will be sharing some of its images here from time to time. He recently sent me a presentation about about the archive's war photography — and I was intrigued by some of the earliest photography in Afghanistan: the work of John Burke.
Roger Fenton was probably the first to photograph a major conflict — the Crimean War in 1855. And it's quite possible that photographers like William Baker, who trained John Burke, had already photographed in Afghanistan. But these are some of the earliest photographs from Afghanistan that I've seen.
Sarah McDonald, curator at Hulton Archive, wrote for B&W Magazine that John Burke was "an Irish Catholic from the lower ranks of the British Army, with a love of horse-racing and cricket, a free and easy manner that endeared him to soldiers and tribesman alike, and a reputation as a womanizer who left at least two illegitimate children in his wake."
He traveled from India to Afghanistan to document the Second Afghan War: the second, obviously, in a series of regional British skirmishes. This war, also called "The Great Game" was fought to ward off territorial threats from Imperial Russia. Burke's photos of the war, unlike today's action stills and on-the-go snapshots, are carefully composed portraits and scenes — of camps, officers, locals or landscapes.
"His grand landscapes," McDonald writes, "peppered by isolated fortresses, colossal mud brick walls, sun-baked in summer and snow-capped in winter and the native soldiers with their mix of tunic, bandoleers, tumbling turbans, puttees and whiskers, are almost abstract in their barrenness and isolation." This is what 19th-century Afghanistan looked like — at least from a British perspective.
Burke described himself a "photo artist," rather than just a photographer because for him, photography was business. Although only a small number of artisans could really call themselves photographers at the time, it was growing in popularity, especially with the introduction of dry plates and ready-prepared paper. Photojournalism as we know it today didn't really take shape until WWI — and especially during WWII, when photographers like Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson were in the field with small, portable cameras. In Burke's era, it was a commercial industry.
"As the art of war became more and more mechanical, so did the artillery of the illustrator," Omar Khan writes in this book. Still, although technology prompted changes in war photography, there are certain notable parallels between Burke's photography and that of today. Butson noted that, more than 100 years after Burke, Afghanistan is still at war. "It's a history repeating itself scenario," he said on the phone.
It's somewhat unfortunate that the Hulton Archive can illustrate more than a century of war in Afghanistan. But it's also an interesting visual timeline. I asked Butson if he has seen any early photographs taken by Afghans. The best he could offer was that one portrait of John Burke might have been taken by an Afghan. I can't help but wonder what other perspectives might be out there.
- Check out contemporary photo coverage from Afghanistan by NPR's David Gilkey. What do you see: Changes? Parallels? Leave your comments.
- An interesting article about another batch of early photos from the Telegraph.