Donna DeCesare

Back in November the exhibition WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath opened at its fourth and final venue, the Brooklyn Museum. This exhibition, which I curated with Anne Tucker and Will Michels in my former role in the photography department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, featured over 400 photographic objects dating from 1848 to 2012, including a number of photographs from the Harry Ransom Center’s collections. Our curatorial mission was neither to tell a history of war illustrated by photography nor to present a series on singular photographers. Instead, we hoped to bring together a selection of objects that highlighted the intersections between war and photography.

Photographs from the Ransom Center collections were included throughout the exhibition, enriching the thematic sections that explored daily routine, shell shock, and dissemination, as well as battlefield burial and death. The Gernsheim collection yielded a chilling 1871 print of communards in coffins, an image likely used to discourage further unrest in the streets of Paris, as well as Roger Fenton’s iconic and controversial 1855 photograph The Valley of the Shadow of Death from the Crimean War.

A Ransom Center fellowship funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment enabled curator Anne Tucker to spend weeks going through box after box of the Ransom Center’s prints, lantern slides, and stereographs. While in the reading room, she could compare the croppings of multiple photographs of Captain Ike Fenton and the U.S. Marines during the Korean War by David Douglas Duncan and share her findings. She also surveyed the collection of prints made at the height of the civil war in El Salvador by 30 international photographers, including Donna DeCesare and Harry Mattison.

The New York Journal- American photo morgue provided one of my favorite photographs in the exhibition. It is a small print from 1918 of a carrier pigeon being released from a tank on the Western Front. The image itself references one of the means of communication (pigeon transport) that is often associated with World War I, but it is also important as a photographic object because it carries the marks and highlights of an editor’s pencil, readying the print for reproduction and the image for dissemination.

Please click on the thumbnails below to view larger images.

David McLellan. “Releasing Carrier Pigeon from Tank, Western Front,” August 1918. Gelatin silver print.

Roger Fenton. “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” 1855. Salted paper print from a paper negative.

Felice Beato. “Gallows on which two of the King of Delhi’s sons were hanged for having taken part in the murder of the English resident at Delhi at the commencement of the mutiny, India,” May 1857. From the album “Photographic views, Crimea, India &c.” Albumen print.

David Douglas Duncan. “Corporal machine-gunner Leonard Hayworth upon learning there were no more grenades, ammunition from his machine-gun reinforcements to take the place of the wounded and dead or communication from the rear, Korea,” September 1950. Gelatin silver print.

David Douglas Duncan. “Captain Ike Fenton, Commanding Officer of Baker Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, receives reports of dwindling supplies during the battle to secure No-Name Ridge along the Naktong River, Korea,” September 1950. Gelatin silver print.

James (Jimmy) H. Hare “Men carrying wood to a pyre in the fields near Lioyang where five dead are laid out,” ca. 1904–1905. Lantern slide.

James (Jimmy) H. Hare. “Taking a bath at twelve below zero in December along the Sha O River,” c. 1904–1905. Gelatin silver print.

Roger Fenton. “L’Entente Cordiale,” February 29, 1856. Salted paper print.

Harry Mattison. “Nuns Leaving the cathedral after the funeral of Archbishop Romero,” March 30, 1980. Gelatin silver print.

Timothy O’Sullivan. “A Harvest of Death,” July 4, 1863. Albumen silver print.

Photojournalist Susan Meiselas broke tradition when she photographed the “people’s revolt” in Nicaragua in color. In 1981, black and white was still the accepted medium in which to depict conflict. Yet, she described the choice as best capturing “the vibrancy and optimism of the resistance.”

Learn more about Meiselas’s photograph and how it influenced Donna DeCesare, award-winning documentary photographer and University of Texas at Austin Associate Professor of Journalism. DeCesare writes about this and other images from the current exhibition Radical Transformation: Magnum Photos into the Digital Age, noting their impact on her photography and teaching.

Radical Transformation: Magnum Photos into the Digital Age, on display at the Ransom Center from September 10 through January 5, explores the evolution of Magnum Photos from print journalism to the digital age, revealing a global cooperative in continual flux, persistently exploring new relationships between photographers, their subjects, and their viewers.

On this Thursday, September 26 at 7 p.m., DeCesare speaks about her new book Unsettled/Desasosiego, which explores the effects of decades of war and gang violence on the lives of youths in Central America and the United States. A book signing follows.

DeCesare was recently honored with a Maria Moors Cabot Prize from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for outstanding reporting on Latin America and the Caribbean.

War photography exhibition showcases images from the Ransom Center’s photography collection

Teaching Magnum: What we can learn from Magnum Photos

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