121 14 15 16 17 18 The GreatWar But Rider-Rider’s iconic photographs of Passchendaele—the mud, the mist, the duckboards, and the wounded—hint at a wider power that war photographs possess: perhaps without our even realizing it, they are a major way in which we have come to think we know what the Battle of Passchendaele—and, in fact, the First World War— looked like. Historians have for decades pointed to the incredible literary output of the First World War. More recently, Beatriz Pichel argues that the First World War is not remembered as a photographic war (though it was one) and that it failed to produce a truly iconic image comparable to the likes of Joe Rosenthal’s Old Glory Goes Up on Mount Suribachi, or Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day in Times Square—both from the Second World War. For these reasons, it can be easy to forget how much photographs of war—today viral on social media—have permeated our perceptions of what the Western Front must have looked like. The illustrative power of war photographs is nothing new. Indeed, a goal of the CWRO’s war photography program was to bring the war home (just as Rider-Rider hoped his photographs of Passchendaele would do), and allow viewers of war photographs—through exhibitions, newspapers, illustrated journals, stereoviews, lanternslides, postcards, and prints—feel like they knewwhat the Western Front looked like. While photographs possess this immense possibility, it comes with an inherent and commensurate limitation. We will never truly know what life was like on the Western Front, in part because Rider-Rider’s photographs only have the power to showus that which he chose to focus his lens upon. This is to say nothing of a photograph’s inability to convey smell, sound, or other senses beyond sight. How did those photographs feel to Rider-Rider when he escorted them in large wooden crates across the Atlantic to Canada in May 1919? Heavy. They felt heavy. William Rider- Rider, O-2295: Lt. J. Strachan, V.C., & Squadron of the famous Squadron of Fort Garry Horse passing through a village on the Cambrai Front some days after the advance, December 1917, Seaforth Highlanders Regimental Archives, 2018.413.2295.
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