The Eye of War: words and photographs from the front line Foreword by John Keegan; text by Phillip Knightley Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 288pp, £30 ISBN 0689505035

For more than 150 years, photographers have been recording war: to convey reality or for propaganda. Sometimes the result has been to produce art. The Eye of War is a stunning collection of what Susan Sontag called "the most irresistible - and picturesque - news".

There are bleak battlefields: the cratered mud of Passchendaele in 1917, with stark tree trunks poking through an eerie mist; the still elegance of Balaclava Harbour in the Crimea in the spring of 1855, all neat tents and not a hint of disease or carnage. There's a vivid black-and-orange cauliflower cloud of napalm over the rice paddies of Vietnam; and a Bosnian Croat firing on his neighbours from his bedroom window in Mostar.

The photographs in this book are among the most powerful ever taken. Some are hard to view, but nevertheless clamour to be seen. Despite the millions of words despatched by reporters on the front lines, a single picture can brand itself into the memory with unrivalled intensity. Every aspect of war is here: the soldiers, the wounded, the prisoners, the civilians, the violence, the damage and, inevitably, the death.

All the best professionals seem to be included - Mathew Brady, Robert Capa, W Eugene Smith, Don McCullin, Larry Burrows and James Nachtwey. More than simply capturing an image at "exactly the right moment", these photographers act as intelligent eyewitnesses to history. Iconic pictures such as the ruins of Dresden presided over by a benevolent religious statue in 1945, the bookcases standing proud amid the rubble of the London Blitz, the naked burnt child fleeing a napalm attack in South Vietnam, join equally striking but less familiar photographs. We find here, too, French faces suffused with sorrow and disbelief as the Nazis march into Paris; a shell-shocked US marine staring emptily at the camera in a Vietnamese street; a small Afghan boy carrying firewood along a deserted street in Kabul edged with spooky ruins.

The book's text includes comments by the photographers, quotations from those in the pictures and contemporaneous accounts of combatants, victims and observers. John Keegan provides an authoritative introduction, and each chapter includes a succinct essay by Phillip Knightley. Trotting briskly through the list of historical conflicts, these chapters elegantly make the point that the arguments surrounding the media coverage in Iraq are far from new. The British government tried to keep the cameras away from the battlefield as early as the First World War; the Crimean war was a masterclass in tidying up a scene of carnage; the Spanish-American war of 1898 gave rise to a classic example of journalists inflaming public opinion. There is also a convincing bit of film footage of a medical team operating under fire in the Boer war, which was in fact shot with actors on Hampstead Heath in London. Photography as propaganda has played a part in almost every conflict.

But what about problems with the reality of war - the gruesome deaths, the not so honourable actions, the suffering, the ugliness, the cruelty? Even though much was written earlier this year about the way pictures of the dead were used by both the Americans and the Iraqis, governments and armies have wrestled for more than a century with the dilemma of sustaining support for the war effort without showing the real cost in lives.

Editors have also shrunk from publishing. The British army's chief of intelligence during the First World War, Brigadier General J V Charteris, is reported to have told a hopeful correspondent: "Say what you like, old man. But don't mention any places or people." And in the first Gulf war, Kenneth Jarecke's incinerated Iraqi soldier, a terrifying but accurate reminder of the effect of efficient modern warfare, was not published in the United States.

The final photographs in this book are from this year's invasion of Iraq, and they include a horribly beautiful nightscape of Baghdad during an air raid. There are delicate blobs of street lights and sunset- yellow clouds of smoke; this glossy, postcard-like picture is in fact a scene of aggression and destruction. Even with television competing to deliver the most arresting images, there can be no doubt that the single picture retains a special power. The Eye of War does justice to those who risk their lives to get it.

Kate Adie's Corsets to Camouflage: women and war is just published by Hodder & Stoughton

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website