I travelled to Manchester today to see the war photographs of George Rodger, one of the four Magnum Photo Agency founders, at the Imperial War Museum, North. There were about 70 photographs in the exhibition and I was familiar with perhaps ten of them, including one of my favorites by any photographer, being a small group of waitresses from Lyons Corner House coffee drinking establishment (it certainly was not a coffee bar) putting the shutters on the windows to cover them up to observe the blackout. The group of women is united in the uniforms and in their common nervousness over the danger of the situation. Yet in amongst the unity, there is still the division of rank and the differences of personality – It was lovely to see that photograph, in fact all of them ‘in the flesh’ as it were.
What I did not expect was the recorded interview with George Rodger that was playing on a loop. George Rodger died in 1995 and I guess the interview was shot within five years of his death.
He described how during the war, working for Life magazine, he worked as a free agent who travelled to Africa with the Free French forces and made his way across the world, seeing one theatre of war after another.
He talked about those photographers who were taken into the army to work as photographers and he mentioned Bert Hardy, who though he was a veteran photographer with a big reputation, had to take a two-month course to ‘learn’ how to photograph with his Super Ikonta before he was given the rank of sergeant and allowed out to take photographs.
Rodgers talked about the fact that he tended not to take shots of dead bodies because it was not his way. But that it was not until he arrived at Bergen Belsen and started to photograph what he saw there and arrange his compositions, that he recognized how desensitized he had become to the sight of bodies. And so he swore never to cover another war, and he did not.
His Leica 111a and his passports and business card were on show, and there were a few shots of the Nuba tribesmen he photographed later – in the 60s I think.
A terrific exhibition, crazily laid out though, so that each section read from left to right but was entered from the right.
Here is a shot from the cafe window in the building (and yes, the windows do lean) and a shot from outside the building.
