The Face of War: New Zealand's Great War Photography (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Face of War: New Zealand's Great War Photography Nic Clarke Callister, Sandy — The Face of War: New Zealand's Great War Photography. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008. Pp. 150. In The Face of War: New Zealand's Great War Photography, Sandy Callister sets out to scrutinize "how photographs shaped, and continue to shape" New Zealanders' memories and understandings of the Great War. In doing so, Callister engages with a myriad of subjects, including, but not confined to, medical photography (in particular photographs of those who suffered facial wounds), memorialization, battlefield photography, and how photographs acted (and continue to act) as a bridge between battle front and home front, war and peace, past and present. The result is a compelling cultural history that not only offers new insight into how the "war to end all wars" affected New Zealanders, but also challenges the traditional photographic remembering of the conflict in which the battlefield has characteristically had primacy. Callister argues that New Zealanders' tendency to privilege photographs that portray the "spectacle of war" when seeking images of the conflict have acted to obscure, if not render invisible, other forms of photographic evidence that illustrate the impact of war on the dominion. As a result, New Zealanders' collective memory of the war has become skewed. By focusing on images of the trenches, primarily those that clung precariously to the hillsides of the Dardanelles, New Zealanders have forgotten much else of their nation's experience of the war. No stronger case for this argument is made than in Callister's exploration of the images of those men who received severe wounds, and particularly those who were wounded in the face. The removal of these disturbing photographs from the view of the public — which began during the war — has caused New Zealanders to forget horrific realities of war and become complacent in the face of euphemisms for wounding, especially since these "broken gargoyles" have long since died. It is in these pictures that we are confronted with the visual definition of "nicked by shrapnel": a long, deep gouge in the side of a man's face; eyes blasted from sockets; limbs torn from bodies. It is here we see "vivid and undeniable evidence of the violence meted out to New Zealand soldiers" (p. 101). Importantly, these images also draw attention to those men whose sacrifices are often overlooked in public rememberings of the war: the maimed and disfigured. [End Page 473] The Face of War also offers important insight into how photographs became both loci of memory for and bridges of connection between those who went to war and those who stayed behind. Photographs allowed soldiers to retain a tangible link to their loved ones, no matter where they might be. The reverse was equally true. Photographs of New Zealand's men-folk in uniform not only gave those who stayed within the bounds of Aotearoa a treasured keepsake, but also — in the case of those photographs sent back home from foreign shores — allowed them to share in some of the adventure. Most importantly, photographs provided visual evidence of the sacrifices families had made, particularly if their loved ones had fallen in battle. In this vein, Callister's examination of the way in which photographs were used as proxies for the bodies of loved ones who would never return to New Zealand's shores is of great importance. Acting as personal focal points for the traumatic loss of loved ones for many individuals, families, and communities, photographs became important sites of mourning that are deserving of greater examination by those seeking to examine how New Zealanders grieved and remembered, both individually and as a nation. As one might expect in such a wide-ranging but relatively short work, there are both general and specific weaknesses. In more than one instance it would have been better if Callister had spent more time teasing out and directly engaging with the complex and intertwining strands of individual points, rather than simply flagging them and moving on to the next, equally interesting, topic of discussion. Callister's argument that overrepresentation of Gallipoli in New Zealand's Great War photography has influenced the way New Zealanders...