Photographic propaganda during the Great War part 3

For the official photographers a war on such a massive scale was new and a recurring problem for them was how to convey this magnitude. Frank Hurley, the Australian photographer, resorted to combining negatives in order to convey the multiplicity of action.  Hurley was a household name long before the war owing to his photographic work on the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica. He felt that the horror of the Western Front needed to be represented and only embellishment of the kind that composites permitted would allow the reality of the scale and suffering to be communicated.
This only incurred the wrath of the generals who felt that such tampering amounted to faking and that the point of official photographs was that they should be scrupulously genuine

Hurley’s largest ‘composite photomural’ titled ‘The Raid’ which was created by overlaying 12 different negatives taken during training exercises or secured battlefields after the action had finished.

Hurley however was soon moved to photograph military efforts in the Middle East but not before creating many composite images that conveyed the massive size of the war.Later in London prints which measured over 20 ft. x 15’6″ were exhibited to large demanding audiences who had queued for hours to see for the first time the full scale of war. 

Frank Hurley puts the finishing touches to a giant enlargement of one of his controversial photomontages of the Western Front, which formed part of an exhibition of Australian official war photographs at the Cartwright Hall, Bradford.