Sir Donald McCullin, CBE, Hon FRPS (9 October 1935), is a British photojournalist. He is particularly recognized for his war photography and images of urban strife. Don started his career as a photography assistant while completing his National Service in the Royal Air Force (RAF). He actually failed the photographer’s test. This forced him to spend the majority of his time in a darkroom. One turning point in his career came from photographing and publishing images of a local London gang. The series is titled The Guvnors. This cemented his role as a photographer. He continued to photograph, jumping between the Vietnam War and the Northern Ireland conflict. In 1968, his Nikon camera stopped a bullet meant for him. Despite his fame as one of the greatest war photographers, the Conservative British Government cut his work short. They stopped him from photographing the Falklands War.
João Silva (9 August 1966) is a Portuguese-born South African war photographer. He was the last working member of the Bang-Bang Club. This was a group of photographers who covered South Africa. João captured images from the time of Nelson Mandela’s release to the first elections in 1994. He worked alongside Kevin Carter, whose images caused controversy among viewers. Silva has worked in many areas across the globe. Africa, the Balkans, Central Asia, Russia, and the Middle East. Like many war photographers, he found himself injured while capturing images. On 23 October 2010, Silva stepped on a land mine while on patrol with US soldiers in Kandahar, Afghanistan. He lost both his legs. Between the time of the explosion and passing out, he managed to capture three images from his prone position. João once said of himself “I’m a historian with a camera […]”.
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Joseph Duo, a Liberian militia commander loyal to the government, exults after firing a rocket-propelled grenade at rebel forces at a key strategic bridge on July 20, 2003 in Monrovia, Liberia. Chris Hondros/Getty Images
The first known photograph ever taken was by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827, showing a view from a window of his home in France’s Burgundy region.
In 1839, the first known photograph of a person was taken in Paris, showing a shoe shiner working on the Boulevard du Temple.
But it wasn’t until Mathew Brady, known as the father of photojournalism, and his employee, Andrew Gardner, began shooting pictures of dead American soldiers on Civil War battlefields that the medium transformed the way people saw war.
Since then, photography has both glorified and underscored the atrocities of conflict and war.
Here are eight of the most iconic war photographs of all-time in chronological order.
1. The Dead of Antietam (1862)
Dead soldiers are photographed on the battlefield at Antietam in 1862. Alexander Gardner
After the bloody Civil War battle of Antietam, Andrew Gardner took 70 shots of the dead in a field.
It was the first time dead soldiers had been photographed on a battlefield.
When Gardner later put them on display in New York City, the horrors of the Civil War, which before had only been seen in paintings, finally became apparent to Americans.
2. Warsaw Ghetto Boy (1943)
Jewish people in the Warsaw, Poland, ghetto surrender to the Nazis in 1943. Wikimedia Commons
Likely taken by a Nazi photog named Franz Konrad, this photo shows Nazis rounding up Jewish people in the Warsaw ghetto.
The 9-year-old boy in the picture may have been Dr. Tsvi Nussbaum, who later became a doctor in New York, but the claim was never proven.
In any event, as the Washington Post’s Clay Harris wrote in 1978, the picture “wrenches the heart because it appears that the boy, like millions of Jews and others, is to die at the hands of the Nazis.”
3. Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima (1945)
Five Marines and a Navy corpsman plant a US flag after the bloody battle for Iwo Jima in 1945. Photographer: Joe Rosenthal
This photo by Joe Rosenthal of the American flag being planted on Iwo Jima may be the Second World War’s most iconic photo.
Fifty years after the picture was taken, the Associated Press wrote that it may be the world’s most widely reproduced.
Half of the six soldiers depicted died — among 6,821 Americans — on the very same island they claimed: Franklin Sousley, Michael Strank, and Harlon Block.
Rosenthal received a Pulitzer Prize for the photo in 1945.
4. Raising a Flag over the Reichstag (1945)
Soviet soldiers plant their flag atop the Reichstag to conclude the Battle of Berlin and cement the fall of Nazi Germany. Yevgeny Khaldei, Wikimedia Commons
This was the Red Army’s “Iwo Jima” moment: Soviet troops fixing the flag of the Soviet Union atop the Reichstag to conclude the Battle of Berlin.
On May 2, 1945, Soviet photographer Yevgeny Khaldei snapped the now-famous photo of Alyosha Kovalyov and Abdulkhakim Ismailov raising the hammer and sickle over the Reichstag.
But the truth behind the photo, who was in the photo, and who actually raised the Soviet victory banner, was muddled by the Russian propaganda machine for decades.
South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the National Police, fires his pistol into the head of suspected Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem (also known as Bay Lop) on a Saigon street, early in the Tet Offensive. Eddie Adams/Associated Press
Taken by Eddie Adams, this photo shows South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing suspected Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem in Saigon during the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War.
The photo was shown around the world and displayed at anti-war demonstrations in the US.
“You can see the gun, you can see the expression on the man’s face as the bullet enters his head, and you see the soldier on the left who is wincing at the thing that has happened,” Hal Buell, who previously ran The Associated Press, told NPR in 2009.
Adams won a Pulitizer Prize for the picture in 1969, but later wrote that the attention given to the picture disturbed him.
6. Napalm Girl (1972)
South Vietnamese forces follow after terrified children, including 9-year-old Kim Phuc, center, as they run down Route 1 near Trang Bang after an aerial napalm attack on suspected Viet Cong hiding places on June 8, 1972. Associated Press
Taken by Nick Ut, this photo shows South Vietnamese children running after a South Vietnamese plane accidentally dropped napalm on its own soldiers and civilians during the Vietnam War in 1972.
The naked girl, Kim Phuc, had ripped off her burning clothes while fleeing.
Ut said Phuc screamed in Vietnamese, “Too hot! Too hot!” before he put her in an AP van where she crouched on the floor. Her burnt skin peeled off her body as she sobbed “I think I’m dying, too hot, too hot, I’m dying.”
The picture became symbolic of the atrocities of the Vietnam War, and Ut won a Pulitzer Prize for the shot in 1973. Phuc, now a 55-year-old Canadian citizen, runs a foundation that assists children injured and traumatized by war.
7. Joseph Duo in Battle (2003)
Joseph Duo, a Liberian militia commander loyal to the government, exults after firing a rocket-propelled grenade at rebel forces at a key strategic bridge on July 20, 2003 in Monrovia, Liberia. Chris Hondros/Getty Images
In June 2003, Chris Hondros took this image of Liberian commander Joseph Duo after he fired an RPG at rebel forces during a battle in Monrovia during the Second Liberian Civil War.
But Hondros himself later admitted in an interview that he wasn’t sure whether the photo glorified or condemned war.
“Does it celebrate war or is it, you know, something else?” Hondros said. “I think a lot of different people would take different things away from that picture.”
8. Iraqi Girl at Checkpoint (2005)
In January 2005, Chris Hondros captured this picture of 5-year-old Samar Hassan after US troops had accidentally killed her parents at a checkpoint in the Iraqi town of Tal-Afar.
The photo ran in newspapers and media outlets around the world for days, forcing the US military to change how it operated checkpoints and further questioned the role of the US in Iraq.
Hondros was killed in 2011 while covering the Libyan Revolution.
Here are some other iconic war photos to check out:
Andrew Quilty’s photography career began in Sydney, in the year 2000, on the day his application to a university photo elective was rejected. He quit, and set off around Australia with a surfboard and a Nikon F3 that his uncle—also a photographer—had passed down.
Fate further intervened a week into the trip when his van was broken into. Everything but his well-hidden camera, and surfboard, which he was riding at the time, was stolen.
30,000KM later, he enrolled in the Sydney Institute of TAFE’s Photography program, finishing at the top of his class in 2004.
He was given an informal internship at Fairfax Media which evolved into full-time employment. There, Quilty found himself surrounded by some of Australia’s most outstanding photographers. They reshaped his worldview and set him on a course that continues to inspire his work today.
He left Fairfax in 2010 and freelanced from Sydney before relocating to New York City in 2012. But it was during a trip to Afghanistan and the Middle East, in 2013, that he first discovered bonafide purpose and fulfilment in his photography.
He has been based in Kabul, Afghanistan ever since.
His work in Afghanistan has been published worldwide and garnered accolades including, in 2019, a World Press Photo, a Picture of the Year International award of excellence in the category of Photographer of the Year (POYI), and prior to that, a George Polk Award, three POYI awards, a Sony World Photography award and six Walkley Awards, including the Gold Walkley, the highest honour in Australian journalism. In 2016, a selection of his work from Afghanistan was exhibited at the Visa pour L’Image Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France.
He has travelled to two thirds of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces and continues to document the country through pictures and, increasingly, the written word.
He doesn’t usually refer to himself in the third person.
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Western memories of the Vietnam War are shaped by photographers working with the American and South Vietnamese forces. These images from the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong are less common. These pictures were taken by amateurs and photojournalists working with the Vietnam News Agency, the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese Army. They are sensational.
Photojournalist with Reuters news agency. Award winning of Premio Luchetta prize for 2017 in photography section. I work as photojournalist since 2005 . Experienced General Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the broadcast media industry. Skilled in Advertising, Event Management, Editing, Journalism, and Media Relations. graduated from Journalism Damascus University.
Heidi Levine is an American freelance photojournalist based in Jerusalem. She has worked as a professional photojournalist since 1983, starting as a staffer with the Associated Press in Israel, then with French photo agency Sipa Press in 1993.Over the course of her photojournalism career, Levine has covered the most critical moments in the Middle East including the revolutions in Egypt and Libya, the crisis in Syria, the IsraelLebanon war, and the numerous conflicts in the Gaza Strip.
She has brought frontline action and behind-the-scenes human stories to the world’s major press outlets. Her photographs have appeared, often as cover stories, in numerous international publications including Time, Stern, Focus, Paris Match, L’Express, Newsweek, Time, The New York Times Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, Amnesty International, Forbes Magazine, and more.
She has won a myriad of awards for her photographs of conflicts and an Emmy nomination in 2012 .
Pedro Pantoja (Rio de Janeiro, December 17, 1984) is a Brazilian military photographer. At the age of 20, Pedro Pantoja joined photojournalism, excelling in photographing urban conflicts for the newspaper Povo do Rio, reaching the position of photo editor, where he remained until 2013. In 2007, Pedro Pantoja taught photojournalism at one of Brazil’s leading vocational schools. In 2010, he volunteered on social projects to teach photography to underprivileged youth and adults. In 2013, he became a military man, where he is currently the Corporal of the Military Police of Rio de Janeiro State, which specializes in the recording of images in areas of combat by drug traffickers. In the military area, he studied Crisis Management involving hostages and Tactical Applications in Special Operations Command. In his risky work, Pedro Pantoja has developed unique techniques appropriate for operational photographic work in the midst of urban wars in Rio de Janeiro’s slums.
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He has been documenting the refugee crisis around the world for over a decade. He is a National Geographic photographer and the founder of Everyday Refugees Foundation.
As the former Associated Press Chief Photographer for the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan he covered conflicts across the region as well documenting major events in Europe, Asia, Africa and the US. He spent four years in Pakistan as AP’s chief photographer for the region, and for the last several years has been documenting the refugee crisis across Europe. Most recently his work has focused on the issue of stranded unaccompanied refugee minors for National Geographic Magazine.
Muhammed has covered major events in the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the funeral of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the US led-war in Iraq, including the capture of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, the Yemeni revolution, the Syrian civil war as well as events in Saudi Arabia, China, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, France, The Netherlands, Serbia, South Africa including the funeral procession of Nelson Mandela.
His work has received numerous international awards, including Picture of the Year in 2007’s POYI, in 2014 the Oliver S. Gramling Award for journalism, and the same year he was named TIME Magazine’s Best Wire Photographer. Muheisen has also won multiple prizes in the APME News Photos Award, the John L. Dougherty Award, Asia Media Awards, National Headliner Awards, the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar, Festival Du Scoop, China International Press Photo Contest, NPPA Best of Photojournalism, Sigma Delta Chi Awards, Xposure International Photography Festival Award and the MCF Engaged Journalist Award. He was also a World Press Photo Joop Swart Master Class participant in 2012.
Muheisen served as a jury member in the 2016 Picture of the Year International, the 2015 World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass and the 2013 Visa D’Or for Visa pour L’image and the 2017 LensCulture Emerging Talent Awards.
He is a member of the Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award advisory committee at the International Women Media Foundation, the founder and Chairman of Everyday Refugees Foundation and a member of the nominating committee selecting the participants for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Master Class.
Among other exhibitions, a collection from a decade of his work about life in a war was exhibited in the French photo festival Visa pour L’Image in Perpignan, France. His work about refugees was exhibited at Festival des Libertes in Brussels, Belgium and work about the displaced people was shown at THE FENCE in Brooklyn, Atlanta, Boston and Houston, USA. Most recently a selection of his work was exhibited at Xposure International Photography Festival in Sharjah, UAE.
WAR PHOTOGRAPHERS 