De la SPA a los fotógrafos amateur. La cámara como instrumento de apropriación de la guerra

Abstract

The Great War led to political, social and technological transformations that affected the development of late conflicts in Europe. But not all transformations were related to weaponry. This paper will examine the impact that the war had in the improvement of the relatively new technology of photography, and the ways in which photographic practices framed different war experiences. With this aim in mind, this paper will analysis several military and civil uses of photography in France, focusing on the two main collectives: the section photographique de l’armée, the military photographic service created in 1915 with the purpose of taken official images of the war, and the amateur photographers, which were soldiers and officers who brought their own cameras to the front. In both cases, this paper will examine the ways in which the military propaganda used photography to build and disseminate its messages. In particular, the focus of the analysis will be on how military services tried to control photographic practices, and how these practices penetrated into the civil society, who appropriated them. In this way, this paper will show that photography became a key technology for the French population during the war not only because photographs allowed the population to see what was happening. Above all, photography became essential because the uses of photographs and cameras allowed the appropriation of the conflict and its integration into family memory by means of the albums.