If the still pictures sent back to the United States helped to win the battle for public opinion at home, photographs taken for military purposes helped to win the war at the fronts it is estimated, for example, that between 80 and 90 percent of all the Allied information about the enemy came from aerial photography taken by U.S. Most military photography was taken for official reasons. The challenge amid all this innovation became how to organize the picture-taking so that all the fronts would be covered and all publications would have access to the images.Īs in World War I, the army, the navy, the Marines and the Coast Guard each assigned military combat correspondents and photographers to their operations. Large-format Speed Graphic cameras that took 4 x 5 inch negatives became supplemented with smaller 2 ¼ x 2 ¼ Rolleiflex cameras and the even smaller and faster 35mm cameras with telephoto lenses. Long-range airplanes could rapidly deliver rolls of film and thousands of prints. Yet, unlike during the First World War, single photographs could be transmitted across oceans by radio and across continents by wire. military photographyĪs a war on five continents, seven seas, and a dozen fronts, World War II posed entirely new problems of personnel, expense, transportation, and communication. During World War II, the photography of Americans at war was still an affirmation of the United States as the land of the free, the shining city on a hill, the last best hope for civilization. During the succeeding wars in Korea and Vietnam, photography was used to challenge American policies and question the nation's values.

It was a continuing attempt to reaffirm the nation's democratic ideals and cultural values.

Documenting soldiers in war was an expansion of the photographers' prewar project of documenting the people of the United States. Many of the photographers of the war came out of the 1930s tradition of social documentary photography. During World War II most photographers were 'engaged'-they fervently believed in America and in the American cause.

World war 2 navy photographers