The death of the war photographer

Hollywood has been good to war photographers this year. First came the dystopian blockbuster Civil War, with Kirsten Dunst as a veteran photojournalist touring America at war with itself. Now comes Lee, starring Kate Winslet as second world war legend Lee Miller, who captured the liberation of Paris and the horrors of Dachau.

Both demonstrate the screen appeal of war correspondents, whose hell-raising, bullet-dodging image is tailor-made for the movies. Yet in an era with nearly as many frontlines as in Miller’s time – Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan to name a few – ask yourself this question: can you name a single war photographer who’s doing the job today?

My guess is probably not. And if you’re wondering why, try this test. First, take a newspaper and find a page with a photo on. Now look to see which photographer took it. Can’t see anything? Look more closely. It’s usually there, but written in such tiny print along the edge of the image as to be almost invisible. Compared to a journalist’s byline – like the one on this article – it’s minuscule, a mere footnote in the first draft of history. The only exception to this rule is if they’ve taken some truly remarkable set of images, in which case they may get a mention alongside whichever reporter they’re with.

I write this not as a war photographer myself, but as someone who knows the breed well, having spent 20 years as a newspaper foreign correspondent (or, as some photographers like to put it, a caption writer). During that time, I’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the best photographers in the business, sitting in trenches in the Donbas, following revolutionaries in Libya, and, on one grim occasion, spending six weeks held hostage with one in a cave in Somalia. Indeed, if you’ve picked up a newspaper in the last two decades, the chances are that some of the memorable images of the period have been shot by one of them, be it post-Saddam Iraq, the Arab Spring, or Ukrainian refugees fleeing Putin’s bombs. Yet none are household names, any more than I am.

This is partly because print media is a more anonymous trade than its TV counterpart, our presence in any dispatch usually limited to a photo byline at most. If you want to be a future Kate Adie or Rageh Omar, you need to be there on screen. But it also reflects the fact that Fleet Street’s traditionally grubby reputation has long dissuaded its representatives from lofty aspirations.

It’s a different story in America, where Watergate has never been forgotten, and where journalism still sees itself as a noble, almost priestly profession. But here in the UK, even the top-ranked operatives tend to see themselves as just working hacks. The late, great Marie Colvin, for example, played by Rosamund Pike in the 2018 film A Private War, didn’t take herself half as seriously as her posthumous fanbase does (many of whom, one suspects, only learned who she was after her death).

Fleet Street’s aversion to eulogy is particularly true for photographers. Spend any time on the road with a US press pack, and you’ll hear certain photographers spoken of as living legends, such as New York Times regular Lynsey Addario, whose life story has attracted interest from Steven Spielberg. Here in Britain, though, it’s not that long since photographers were routinely referred to as ‘monkeys’. The nickname was coined by Prince Philip, who once likened a pack of lensmen that tailed him round the Rock of Gibraltar to its resident Barbary apes. But many photographers feel it reflects an ingrained class snobbery in British newspapers.

This, admittedly, never stopped working-class kids like Don McCullin, who left school at 15 and first made a name for himself photographing London teddy boy gangs for The Observer. His career on the frontlines, though, also coincided with the heyday of newspaper weekend magazines, which showcased his work in Vietnam and Biafra just as Vogue showcased Lee Miller’s images from the second world war. Today, few newspapers can afford those big-budget glossies, depriving war photographers of one of their best canvases.

In terms of glamour, admittedly, war photographers still win hands down over war correspondents. Visit any hotel bar near a frontline, and you’ll see that they’re generally more fashionable-looking than their writer counterparts, with more tattoos and trendier hair, the cool bass players in the band on tour. I blame films like Oliver Stone’s 1986 classic Salvador, in which James Woods plays a marvellously degenerate photojournalist covering the country’s civil war, imbibing cheap booze and drugs. More than one photographer has cited Salvador to me as an influence in their career choice, although it may be for the lifestyle as much as anything else. By contrast, few reporters ever mention All The President’s Men, where it’s mainly coffee, cigarettes and the odd late night in a car park with Deep Throat.

War photography’s swashbuckling image has, however, contributed to its undoing as a well-paid profession. Lots of people fancy doing it, and with the advent of digital cameras that do the technical heavy lifting, the days of lengthy darkroom apprenticeships are over. As a result, the international press pack covering wars is a much bigger and more voracious beast than it used to be. When I was in Kyiv during the first month of the invasion, jobs in places like Irpin often turned into undignified bunfights. If Lee Miller was photographing Dachau today, half her shots would probably have the back of some other photographer’s head in the way.

The flood of images has reached the point where some photographers have turned away from conflict work. Among them is Eros Hoagland, whose photographer father John Hoagland was the inspiration for one of the characters in Salvador (Hoagland Snr was killed while covering the civil war there in 1984). Eros, whom I met once in Baghdad years ago, initially followed in his dad’s footsteps, but eventually began to question whether news photography’s claims of ‘bearing witness’ ever changed anything.

‘What I started to (ask) is what is the work worth when there is so much imagery… zipping across everyone’s screens,’ he told Canada’s CBC radio in 2019. ‘I didn’t see any of the problems ever getting fixed.’

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There are, of course, honourable exceptions to this rule. During the siege of Kyiv, Lynsey Addario’s images of a family lying dead on a road after being hit by a mortar shell brought home the full horrors of the invasion. Unlike many citizen journalists clutching their iPhones, a professional photographer has the skill to take images that capture death without necessarily showing gore, and which can therefore be fit for family newspapers.

But the iPhone era has still contributed a flood of usable images on the cheap, devaluing the work of professional photographers to the point where many good freelance photographers struggle to earn a living. My fellow hostage in Somalia, for example, vowed to quit the profession after realising that what he could earn from a foreign assignment was seldom even enough to cover his travel costs.

Some do soldier on, helped by funding from grant-making bodies and Patreon accounts, but the risk to reward ratio gets ever greater. A memoir published this year by Diane Foley, whose photojournalist son James Foley was kidnapped and beheaded in Syria, reveals that he was sometimes paid as little as $70 per article.

As Mrs Foley points out, the money didn’t really matter to him, because he saw his job as a vocation, rather like an aid worker. The irony, however, is that the best-paid warzone photographic work these days often comes from doing PR shots for aid agencies.

‘I get a better daily rate for doing a trip to Africa to photograph some project for Save the Children than I can off any newspaper picture desk,’ one freelancer told me a few years ago. ‘And they treat you better too.’

This, admittedly, may say more about how well-funded Big Aid’s PR budgets are than about how financially threadbare some picture desks have become. But it’s still a sign of the times. And much as Hollywood may be keen on war photographers’ biopics, if there’s nobody to keep the future Millers and McCullins in paid work, it may prove to be a short-lived genre.