War Photography Research Articles

Future Photographs of U.S. Women in Combat

Two grounded theory studies found that photo editors and producers were intent on publishing graphic photographs of women in combat if, and when, they are produced as women have begun to enter US Armed Forces combat units since January 2016. Editors said they aim to treat women the same as men when editing photographs of war, but showed hesitation upon seeing images of women in combat presented in this study, particularly when graphic. An individual level of influence was observed, as was concern for the audience that rivaled other social institutions within the hierarchy of influences. Interviewees in the first grounded theory study included 17 visual editors and producers of various newspaper, broadcast, and online US media companies. The second study included a different set of 20 editors/producers who participated in a think-aloud procedure showing them graphic photographs of women in combat.

The Ambiguity of Amateur Photography in Modern Warfare

This article addresses a number of questions regarding the changing status and resultant interpretations of amateur photographs of war in the twentieth century. It reconsiders the photographs of the German army soldiers during World War II and the photographs taken in Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq war with a view to finding a new approach to contemporary amateur photographs. This new approach shifts away from the study of the contents of the image to a focus on its ongoing reception and ideological effects. The article asks the following questions among others: Are amateur photographs of war and battlefields possible today? Or do amateur photographers and their portrayals of war belong to a bygone era? Have the provocations of amateur images that resist official versions of war been lost to the proliferation of digital possibilities, the overwhelming impact of consumer culture, and the domination of the mass media? Has the disquieting potential of the amateur vanished amid the glut of images of war and violence? If the answer to all these questions is no, then how can we identify amateur photographs of war?

Life and Limb: Perspectives on the American Civil War ed. by David Seed, Stephen C. Kenny, Chris Williams

Reviewed by: Life and Limb: Perspectives on the American Civil War ed. by David Seed, Stephen C. Kenny, Chris Williams Brian Matthew Jordan Life and Limb: Perspectives on the American Civil War. Ed. David Seed, Stephen C. Kenny, and Chris Williams. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-1781382509, 210pp., paper, $29.95. In “The Real War Will Never Get in the Books,” one of the most memorable and oft-quoted parts of Specimen Days (1882), Walt Whitman argued that the “marrow of tragedy concentrated in those Army hospitals” remained the Civil War’s “untold and unwritten history.” “Think how much, and of importance . . . has already been—buried in the grave, in eternal darkness,” he wrote. Our paltry inheritance of 1861 to 1865 was “a few stray glimpses” of a “many-threaded drama.” Life and Limb collects glimpses of the human suffering prompted by the war; each of these testifies eloquently to the efforts of surgeons and nurses, battlefield photographers and prosthetic manufacturers, veterans and writers (many of them well-known, but others less renowned) to make meaning of the misery all around them. A Union assistant surgeon describes the breathless, improvised aftermath of Bull Run, and a New York adjutant pocked by enemy lead narrates his evacuation from the battlefield at Cold Harbor. Nurses recall the woes of hospital wards, then marvel, with perhaps equal parts satisfaction and distress, at their newfound fortitude: “I am simply eyes, ears, hands, and feet,” Sarah Emma Edmonds concedes (34). “It seems strange,” the African American nurse Susie King Taylor comments, “how our aversion to seeing [End Page 336] suffering is overcome in war—how we are able to see the most sickening sights . . . without a shudder” (37). Reports are included of both the insect-infested excuse for a field hospital at Andersonville and Mathew Brady’s New York exhibition of Antietam images. Advertisements and testimonials for artificial limbs are presented, and both post-battle and postwar narratives, several from the pen of Ambrose Bierce, are sampled. Finally, from an insert printed on glossy paper, double amputees stare at us hauntingly, both before and after they are fitted with state-of-the-art arms or legs. Several succinct contributions from modern scholars are modestly interspersed among the sources, ensuring that the voices of Civil War Americans predominate. Like the sources, each essay invites us to interrogate the ways we have gazed at the war and its legacies of human destruction. Robert Leigh Davis reviews Walt Whitman’s Civil War prose, highlighting both its “ethics of intimate attention” and its instructive cadence—a “dilatory pace of hesitating, pausing, stepping aide” (43, 45). Susan-Mary Grant’s splendid essay reminds us that our reflexive laments for the supposedly primitive state of battlefield medicine can obstruct our view of some of the war’s extraordinary surgical coups. Nonetheless, Grant is keenly aware of the war’s “appalling” side; demonstrating the promise of neglected sources, she issues an eloquent call for “a more inclusive narrative, one that brings together the medical and the martial, the soldier and the surgeon” (91–92). Mick Gidley considers the work of Civil War photography, from the battlefield carnage captured on wet plates to the less studied images of maimed and mangled veterans collected that the new Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C., collected during the war. Finally, Dillon Jackson Carroll renders a sketch of the Maine artillerist Napoleon Perkins, who, his new bride and newly fitted prosthetic limb notwithstanding, perhaps never made sense of the loss of his leg. While scholars will no doubt be familiar with many of the materials it excerpts, both the richness and the range of this welcome volume mark it an as ideal addition to undergraduate syllabi. It is likewise ideal for classroom adoption because the editors invite readers to draw their own conclusions—to reach for an interpretation that looks to the war not merely as a military event but as human experience. If Seed, Kenny, and Williams hazard few answers of their own, at least they are asking the right questions. “As distant witnesses to the war and its victims, readers have to work hard not to wallow in the appalling details of...

Footnotes: Amputation and Reconstruction in Reed Bontecou's Civil War Photography

Footnotes:Amputation and Reconstruction in Reed Bontecou's Civil War Photography Elizabeth Young This essay interprets a disturbing Civil War photograph—at once graphic and unreadable—called A Morning's Work, which was made by Union surgeon Reed Bontecou in 1865 and which depicts the amputated feet of soldiers (Fig. 1). In what follows, I identify several literary and visual frameworks for the photograph, aiming less to cement one interpretation than to accrete some ways of seeing it. I first situate A Morning's Work in relation to Civil War medical, battlefield, and portrait photography, showing how exceptional this image is; the amputated feet of the photograph, I suggest, seem closer to the objects of still life painting than to bodies in Civil War visual culture. I then conjoin the photograph with other northern depictions of the aftermath of amputation, including writing by Oliver Wendell Holmes and S. Weir Mitchell. A Morning's Work also contrasts with these narratives of rehabilitation, whether of individual bodies fitted with prosthetic limbs or the nation reunified in Reconstruction; Bontecou's photograph, I argue, is closer to contemporary accounts of amputated limbs neurologically lingering behind. I close by highlighting covert absences in this photograph. Overtly dismembering soldiers' feet, A Morning's Work also seems to amputate female and Black bodies from a wartime body politic. My method in crafting these speculations is to intermix literary, visual, and cultural histories; scholarship from disability studies also informs this approach. Analyzing Bontecou's feet, I emphasize their figurative possibilities, reflecting on what these feet may symbolize metaphorically and what they may be adjacent to metonymically. I also employ, in my own prose, idioms that reference feet—from footnotes to legwork—not to trivialize this material but rather to underscore the cultural importance ascribed to feet. The distinction between having and losing feet is itself at issue here, as marked in the concept of the "phantom limb," first articulated by Mitchell to describe an aftereffect of Civil War amputation. In both radical and conservative ways, I argue, [End Page 487] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Reed Brockway Bontecou, A Morning's Work, 1865 (Stanley B. Burns, M.D. & The Burns Archive) [End Page 488] the feet of Bontecou's A Morning's Work function as phantom limbs, which may be photographically and materially dismembered but nonetheless remain underfoot. ________ Dr. Reed Brockway Bontecou (1824-1907) was a surgeon from upstate New York who served with Union Army regiments and hospitals before becoming chief surgeon at the Harewood US Army General Hospital in Washington, D.C. in 1863. In 1862, the Surgeon General had ordered that medical photographs be taken for teaching and research purposes. Bontecou was the most prolific contributor to the resulting archive, making more than five hundred photographs of wounded soldiers. He collected them in four volumes and sent them to the new Army Medical Museum; some were published in the multivolume Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1870-88), and a few were displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exposition of Philadelphia. Postwar, Bontecou's photographs served in an additional role: they were submitted as evidence in soldiers' pension claims, some adjudicated by Bontecou himself.1 Bontecou's images are landmarks in the history of photography, probably the earliest instance of photographs made for medical purposes. They also exemplify changing medical practices during the Civil War, which prompted advances in medical diagnosis, technique, technology, and education (Devine). In recent years, these photographs have received critical attention from scholars including Christopher Benfey, J. T. H. Connor and Michael Rhode, Kathy Newman, Franny Nudelman, Jeff L. Rosenheim, and Shirley Samuels. They have been published by the collector Dr. Stanley Burns and incorporated in art by photographers John Huddleston and Joel-Peter Witkin.2 The ongoing afterlife of these [End Page 489] photographs attests to their intensity and power as well as their pioneering status as medical photographs. Bontecou's photographs customarily feature a living male soldier with his injury clearly visible; Bontecou also wrote brief medical histories of each injury, sometimes attached to the verso of the image, and included identifying labels within some photographs. His photographs...

Lens of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War

Lens of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War

Insurgent Citizenship: Dr John Nicholas Tresidder's Photographs of War and Peace in British India

Insurgent Citizenship: Dr John Nicholas Tresidder's Photographs of War and Peace in British India

War by Photography: Shooting Japanese in Australia’s Pacific War

Characterised by their determination to get close to the action, the Australian combat cameramen of the Second World War made a significant contribution to the evolution of the war photographer into the dynamic figure familiar today. This is especially true of their intimate documentation of the vicious encounter with the Japanese in New Guinea and other islands of the Southwest Pacific, which went beyond professional bravery. A large corps of official photographers shooting for both government and military agencies expressed the racial ideology of a war fought against an opponent who was increasingly loathed as the war progressed. Their pictures of Australian triumphs over the Japanese, including graphic and often deliberately demeaning pictures of dead and captured enemy, reflected the exigencies of wartime propaganda. But they also expanded on a frame of cultural reference derived from decades of anxiety about the threat of invasion by Japan, and reveal an abiding national view of the battlefield as the definitive arena for a contest of rival masculinities. Australia’s war in the Pacific has attracted increasing scholarly and popular attention in recent years. However, the enormous archive of official photographs has been largely ignored, except as a source of illustrative material. This article argues that the archive needs to be read as a collective text in its own right, for the significant insight it provides into Australian cultural as well as military and geopolitical insecurities.

“What Deepest Remains”: How Photojournalistic Mutualism between Robert Capa and Elmer W. Lower Shaped Modern Concepts of World War II

As American combat photographers documented the horrors and heroism of every major front of World War II, photo editors worked behind the scenes to bring their images to publication. Matching photographers with assignments and selecting images that best told the story—all while navigating censorship, publication expectations, and intercultural societal norms—the photo editor was indispensable to the combat photographer. The partnership of Robert Capa and Elmer W. Lower exemplified such a mutualistic relationship. Whether serendipitous, as it was early in the war when Lower provided assistance in exchange for Capa's photos, or calculated, as it was later in the war when both were employed by Life magazine, their experience exemplifies the mutually beneficial relationship of war photographers and their editors.

The Review of Historical Sociology of Korean War Photography: Focusing on the Activities of US Army Signal Corps Photo Unit (written by Jung Keun Sik and Kang Sung Hyun, Seoul National University Press, 2016) On the Necessity of the International Comparat

The Review of Historical Sociology of Korean War Photography: Focusing on the Activities of US Army Signal Corps Photo Unit (written by Jung Keun Sik and Kang Sung Hyun, Seoul National University Press, 2016) On the Necessity of the International Comparat

Lens of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War

Lens of War is the most recent publication in the University of Georgia Press's innovative UnCivil Wars series that includes other books devoted to the Civil War's environmental disaster; its widespread material destruction; its cowardice, knavery, and scavenging; its unseemly freaks; and even its amputated limbs. In this volume, J. Matthew Gallman and Gary W. Gallagher asked twenty-seven historians to choose a single Civil War photograph and reflect on it in a short essay. The result is a curious accumulation—a collection of essay sketches, each a glimpse or vignette of an aspect of the war through famous (and sometimes not-so-famous) pictures. The book contains no overriding narrative, sustained argument, or even an exploration of established themes—the editors suggest the essays can be read in any order—but instead provides a series of idiosyncratic and often-personal views. The pronoun “I” appears repeatedly. Lens of War is divided into five categories: leaders, soldiers, civilians, victims, and places. Although the main historical materials are photographs, which, as unique forms of representation, might invite a different kind of categorization, the vignettes are placed within a more familiar historiographic framework for the war. Those collected in the leaders section are, perhaps unsurprisingly, among the most conventional, in several instances bordering on the hagiographic. We view Alexander Gardner's famous 1865 close-up portrait of Lincoln, Mathew Brady's portrait of Ulysses S. Grant in 1864 after the Battle of Cold Harbor, Robert E. Lee on his horse Traveller, and Jeb Stuart in Confederate finery; in the accompanying essays we witness the rapture that these figures continue to cultivate in contemporary viewers. Several of the authors recall nostalgically how, as youngsters, they first came upon the pictures and how such moments of early delight and curiosity, even puzzlement and discomfort, led them to careers as historians. Reading such entries, one is constantly reminded of Roland Barthes's claim that photographs can carry a punctum, the tiny, almost-incidental details within pictures that rivet the gaze and become deeply mesmerizing and achingly personal—or, as he notoriously put it, the images harbor the “accident which pricks me, but also bruises me” (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1980, p. 27).

Schultz, Robert and Binh Danh. War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Renewal (Poetry and Visual Art Exhibition) [review

Robert Schultz and Binh Danh. War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Renewal. Poetry and Visual Art Exhibition, Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia. February 7-May 23, 2015; Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, August 21-October 16, 2016.In Part 6 of Song of Myself, Walt Whitman suddenly perceives the grass to be the uttering tongues of all those whose dying feeds the living. While the phrase uttering tongues alludes to speech, it gestures more broadly to the communicative impulse at the heart of words and images. After all, Whitman does name the grass a uniform hieroglyph. Though Whitman's visual poetics and interest in the visual arts predate, or, more accurately perhaps, foreshadow, widespread Modernist poetic interest in the visual arts and verbal-visual collaboration, one hundred and sixty years after the initial publication of Leaves of Grass, a twenty-first-century poet and a visual artist have collaborated with Whitman to produce War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Renewal, a word and image exhibition that opened in February 2015 at the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia. By commingling their verbal and visual arts through collaboration and appropriation of materials past and present, photographer Binh Danh and poet Robert Schultz have produced in War Memoranda a variety of texts, ranging from broadsides to artists' books to the gallery installation, that both memorialize and interrogate the process by which we create shared meaning and memory. As memoranda, these texts proclaim themselves to be notes for the future, gathering for us uttering tongues of the past, including Whitman's own Memoranda During the War, into a collective present.From August 21 through October 16, 2016, War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Renewal will show at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester. Gallery exhibitions are not often read as texts, but in this review, I want to consider how the literal space of the gallery, which is filled with original poetry and art as well as appropriations of historical poetry and art, can be read as a cohesive text in order to offer a conceptual understanding of the project as a whole. In order to do so, I will describe broadly the space of the gallery exhibition while delving into several individual pairings of poetry and visual art to offer insight into the collaborative impulse at the center of the exhibition.A verbal-visual collaboration such as War Memoranda resists the neat categories into which word and image, author and artist, past and present, are often divided. By insisting on the continuum, Danh (a California-based artist whose work is exhibited in galleries across the country) and Schultz (author of three books of poetry and John P Fishwick Professor of English at Roanoke College) not only argue for the need to discover Whitman's interior history of war, which he posits in Memoranda During the War is so often obscured by the impulse to record facts, but also for a recursive, interpenetrating approach to enacting that discovery. They extend their collaboration beyond themselves to join with the seemingly long dead-both Whitman and the many named and unnamed men and women who appear in the Library of Congress's Liljenquist collection of Civil War photography, leafprints of which anchor War Memoranda. They use the flesh of leaves, whose living veins connect the gossamer human story, as both medium and message; photographs from the present and past are reproduced on actual leaves using a chlorophyll printing process, while the trope of leaves weaves through Schultz's poetry. Whitman quotations are placed strategically along the gallery walls, and through the combined effect of this gathering, leaves become a metaphor not only for the cycles of human life, but for the recording of that life.War Memoranda is the work of the body rendering the invisible visible. The artifacts in this exhibition remind viewers that the past is always the material of our present. …

Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos

This strikingly original book examines how sport and ideas of physicality have shaped the politics and culture of modern Laos. Viewing the countryAEs extraordinary transitionsufrom French colonialism to royalist nationalism to revolutionary socialism to the modern development stateuthrough the lens of physical culture, Simon CreakAEs lively and incisive narrative illuminates a nation that has no reputation in sport and is typically viewed, even from within, as a country of cheerful but lazy people. Creak argues that sport and related physical practicesuincluding physical education, gymnastics, and military traininguhave shaped a national consciousness by locating it in everyday experience. These practices are popular, participatory, performative, and, above all, physical in character and embody ideas and ideologies in a symbolic and experiential way. Combining cultural and intellectual history with historical thick description, Creak draws on a creative array of Lao and French sources from previously unexplored archives, newspapers, and magazines, and from ethnographic writing, war photography, and cartoons. More than an oimagined communityo or ogeobody,o he shows that Laos was also a obody at work,o making substantive theoretical contributions not only to Southeast Asian studies and history, but to the study of the physical culture, nationalism, masculinity, and modernity in all modern societies.

Regimes of truth: Australian combat photography in the Second World War

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the policies and directions framing the professional practice of Australian combat photographers in the Second World War. It argues that while their endeavours to offer an account of the nation at war were constrained by predictable considerations of politics and censorship, their commitment to truth was also framed and constricted by an array of cultural considerations. The nation’s ongoing engagement with the history of the First World War, the contrasting organisational cultures of the bureaucracies that the photographers served, and Australian culture’s visual inarticulacy concerning death on the battlefield played key roles both individually and collectively in shaping the photographers’ practices and outputs. The paper will trace the operations of these influences and contend that, as a result, the photographers’ visual record of the Second World War, particularly as it related to the death of Australian servicemen, served to conceal rather than reveal the ultimate truth about the Australian experience of the war.

'Fields of Battle' as 'Fields of Perception': Examining Technological Speed and Public Opinion During the Persian Gulf War

Public perception of the military and what happens in war is often considered in the disjunctive: as either complacent detachment of the informed or apathetic ignorance of the uninformed. Technological changes undeniably impact the ability of media to communicate with its patrons – and of the government or military to utilize media to communicate with citizens. Technological changes in military technology also impact public opinion.Humans respond to visual stimuli in varying ways. However, visual learners make up the majority share of the total population. Because so many people get their news from television today, war photography is one medium that pervasively informs the public not only of happenings during war, but of what the public should think of televised events from the particular war – or sometimes about the military, generally. Increasingly, public receipt of such images and similar broadcasts can be near simultaneous with the event itself because of the drastic advances in communications technology.The linkage between public perception and technological change – military technology or communications devices – is oft-studied and leaves little room for doubt as to impact. However, discussion of speed is not always included in academic writing – outside Paul Virilio, his supporters, and critics. Measuring the impact of speed on public opinion in any empirical sense is beyond the scope of this Paper. Instead, this Paper seeks only to provide a landscape of prevailing thought on the importance of speed in terms of public influence.

The violence of forgetting: trauma and transnationalism in Coetzee's Dusklands

Throughout his career, J.M. Coetzee has sought to resist national confines, preferring instead to emphasise the transnational aspects of culture and history. This essay examines the interplay between nation, transnationalism and literature in Coetzee's novel Dusklands, and shows how a fully formed ethics of violence can already be seen on display in his fictional debut. Key themes that become important throughout Coetzee's oeuvre are developed here – in particular, the abhorrence of violence in any form and a suspicion of the de-humanising elements of nationalism. This essay reads the war photographs in ‘The Vietnam Project’ and their ability to induce a form of post-traumatic stress disorder in the narrator Eugene Dawn as a commentary on the problem of complicity in the act of witnessing violence. The uncompromising stance that Coetzee adopts against nationally sanctioned acts of forgetting becomes clear in the way his novel spares no one from the net of complicity, showing how it extends not only to mediated images of atrocity but also to those who would refuse to bear witness to violence. Finally, the essay proposes the ‘transnational wound’ as an effective metaphor for understanding the transnational and its embedded relationship within national frameworks.

Beyond Abu Ghraib: War trophy photography and commemorative violence

The commemoration of wartime often has emerged alongside brutal practices waged on the enemy, and the photographed events at Abu Ghraib are no exception. Indeed, the composition of these images builds upon a visual history in which certain dynamics are represented within more general and often innocuous combat photography. This article focuses on two things in order to articulate this premise. The first is to outline how ‘war trophy photography’ is the result of the entwined practices of war photography and trophy collection. Mapped using a combined comparative historical approach and visual semiotics, this research draws upon three images, one from WWI, another from WWII, and one from Abu Ghraib. Specifically to highlight how posing within these photos acknowledges the images as trophies, the second function of this article emerges with the concept of ‘commemorative violence’, as the representation is fused with emotional communication and cultural memory.

What the Liberator Saw: British War Photography, Picture Post and the Normandy Campaign

This article examines the photographs of British Army stills photographers who accompanied Allied infantry, tank, and airborne units on the Normandy campaign from June to September 1944. These photographs are rarely commented upon as aesthetic objects in their own right or interrogated as primary historical documents. This article aims to make visible this substantial body of work, held today in the Imperial War Museum, and to identify and analyse the multivalent narratives of the Normandy campaign such images represent. It will contend that such photographs and their captions are traversed by and constructed through British scripts of war that go beyond the photograph's role as visually marking actual historical events. Such photographs helped shape interpretations of not only the prosecution of war in Normandy but also of France as an ambivalent wartime ally — both victor and victim of the Second World War. They were an important vector for the cultural construction (and rehabilitation) of France in the summer of 1944 and played a vital role in establishing the coordinates of France's war story for British readers. By examining these and other front-line photographs published in the popular illustrated magazine Picture Post, this article will argue in favour of a contextual approach to British war photography and its representations of the Normandy campaign. It will analyse how, in this case, rather than representing the Norman population as the passive recipients of liberation, a view prevalent in Allied historical accounts of the period, Picture Post mobilized official British war photographs to depict the common humanity of French and British experiences of war. In so doing, Picture Post's visual narrative promoted the value of intercultural understanding and tolerance at a critical juncture in Anglo–French relations.

War, Photography, Business: New Critical Histories

This article offers a critique of conventional histories of war photography, which have tended to focus on the biographies of individual renowned photojournalists or particular aesthetically striking images of conflict. We argue the need for an expanded conception of war photography which encompasses not only reportage, but numerous other uses in wartime of photographic images and technologies, from reconnaissance imagery to the application of innovations made by photographic companies in the development of weaponry and other military hardware. In parallel, we argue for an appreciation of the broader network of actors, organizations and institutions relevant to war photography in this sense — a network encompassing not only the military and the state, but also photographic companies, weapons manufacturers, individual entrepreneurs, media companies and the public. We proffer the term ‘war photography complex’ as shorthand for this broad cultural phenomenon and aim to prompt a broader sustained engagement with the reciprocity between, on the one hand, the strategy and prosecution of war and, on the other hand, photographic practices and products. The case is also made for the contribution of business history (encompassing the histories of both companies and industry) to examining war photography, acting as a much-needed supplement to methodologies from cultural history and photography studies. Finally, discussing war photography from the Second World War to the Cold War, we articulate the key research questions which constitute this proposed research agenda.

The Business of War Photography, from the Second World War to the Cold War

Photography came to us smilingly and trippingly, fragrant with meadows and beautiful with landscapes, seemingly the handmaid of Peace. She had a bucolic air. Vague rumour, it is true, stated that s...

A female war correspondent on the Italian front, 1915–17: the Austrian travel journalist and photographer Alice Schalek

In July 1915, Alice Schalek was accredited to the Austro-Hungarian Kriegspressequartier (War Press Office) as one of a small number of female war correspondents, publishing her war reports and photographs in the prestigious Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse and in the illustrated German magazine Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. Schalek’s writings and photographs were very popular, but also sharply criticized in some quarters for their alleged lack of objectivity and a tendency to glorify the war. Her most prominent critic was the Austrian writer and journalist Karl Kraus, whose negative judgment dominated Schalek’s historical reputation for many decades. Focusing on Schalek’s assignments to the Italian front during 1915–17, this article looks at the working conditions faced by Schalek as a female war reporter and reconstructs the war images she transmitted to the public through her writings, photographs, and lectures. Moreover, it asks in what ways Schalek’s work reflects a female perspective on the war.