I have been reading an article on photography representation of the colonial war and it really has interested me as it tell of how a war can be represented by images to the public.
The text below talks about how what defines a good war photograph and how it is used for public to see what really happens on the front line but also depict exactly what those circumstances were. I definably got this feeling from when looking at my grandfathers photographs, I got a sense of feeling knowing what he was doing, and where he was looked liked, his friends and what they spent their spare time doing when they weren’t fighting but also seeing the ‘bad’ side to war where they were at the front line fighting and the not so nice images that are taken.
The image below talks about how a lot of photographs were unseen because of the Portuguese government didn’t want people to see this, which I never actually knew about…quite interesting! As well as a room with many photographs inside was burnt down leading to the loss of even more war photographs. This makes me think it is quite lucky for my grandad to have his album and have been able to buy all his images of the photographer who was there whilst he was serving in Angola
This was quite an interesting article to read and it discussed what a war photograph really was and how it depicted the bad that was going in when fighting in Africa, the photographs people wouldn’t really want to see of dead citizens and soldiers.
References
Paulo de Medeiros. (December 1, 2002). War Pics: Photographic Representations of the Colonial War.. Available: http://locate.coventry.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do;jsessionid=A4DECF965183363B307CA94E5B96FBE8?mode=Basic&vid=COV_VU1&tab=remote&. Last accessed 01.04.2014.
