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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wev" data-source="post: 405916" data-attributes="member: 16783">This is an open question, I take it?Photography can be simplistically divided into two primary divisions: documentation and invention. They are, of course, not mutually exclusive in the result, but generally so in the initial motivation. A war photographer, in the classic sense, falls into the first -- recording, for better or worse, the progression of an on-going event. The view taken and achieved may be straight forward and without conscious bias or it may be profoundly the opposite, given the guiding agencies involved. When Brady began photographing the Civil War, his concentration was on the glory of the Union and the assured victory -- it is what his editors at the Herald wanted (and their wood engravers often "improved" his images to do so). When they were having second thoughts about Lincoln before the second presidential election, they pushed for more "charged" images of the war's carnage to both sides. In more recent times, especially with the advent of the free-lance war photographer, the conceptual framework has changed fundamentally. A friend of mine (since passed) was one of these. He was, by his own description, a war paparazzi -- he took pictures to sell and he sold a lot of pictures. Every one was conceived and framed with a potential buyer's demands and biases firmly in mind. In some cases, because he had a very good eye and equipment (to say nothing of luck), an image crossed into the realm of invention, ie it had, divorced from its corporeal creation, conceptional qualities that extended out from its prosaic intent and into what is commonly termed fine art. That said, it was still taken to make money, first and last.</blockquote>

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