The Face of War: New Zealand's Great War Photography - Softcover

Callister, Sandy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1869404076 ISBN 13: 9781869404079

Publisher: Auckland University Press, 2008

Synopsis

By the time the First World War broke out in 1914, photography had become affordable and popular. Many of the 100,000 New Zealanders who went overseas to fight carried cameras with them, determined to capture their part in the 'great adventure'. And soldiers were not the only ones to take photographs: cameras were also used by officials, journalists and medical staff. The Face of War is the first book to examine the photographs, many previously unknown, of New Zealand's First World War experience, tracing a sometimes shocking, often moving visual history through soldiers' snapshots, keepsake portraits, battlefield panoramas, photographic medical records and rolls of honour. Sandy Callister discusses how photography was used to capture and narrate, memorialise and observe, romanticise and bear witness to the experiences of New Zealanders at home and overseas. Her study is the first to argue for the importance of New Zealand photography to the history of war, but also examines in depth the contradictions of this photography: as a site of remembrance and forgetting, of nation and sacrifice, of mourning and mythology, of subjectivity and identity. Both authoritative and insightful, The Face of War superbly illuminates an often overlooked aspect of New Zealand's First World War history.

About this title

Product Description:

Rare Book

Review:

"[Callister] has produced a masterful analysis; a superb, pioneering and moving insight into the emotional impact of World War I, seen through its photography." --Sunday Star Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1869404076
• ISBN 13: 9781869404079
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216