The First World War: Unseen Glass Plate Photographs of the Western Front

by Geoff Dyer (Preface), Carl De Keyzer (Editor), David Van Reybrouck (Editor)

A century after it began, we still struggle with the terrible reality of the First World War, often through republished photographs of its the muddy trenches, the devastated battlefields, the maimed survivors. Due to the crude film cameras used at the time, the look of the Great War has traditionally been grainy, blurred, and monochrome—until now. The First World War presents a startlingly different perspective, one based on rare glass plate photographs, that reveals the war with previously unseen, even uncanny, clarity.

Scanned from the original plates, with scratches and other flaws expertly removed, these oversized reproductions offer a wealth of unusual moments, including scenes of men in training, pictures of African colonial troops on the Western front, landscapes of astonishing destruction, and postmortem portraits of Belgian soldiers killed in action. Readers previously familiar with only black-and-white or sepia-toned prints of the hostilities will be riveted by the book’s many authentic color photographs, products of the early autochrome method. From children playing war games to a wrenching deathbed visit, these images are extraordinary not only for their subject matter, but also for the wide range of emotions they evoke.

Accompanied by a preface from celebrated writer Geoff Dyer and an essay by historian David Van Reybrouck, the photographs here serve both as remarkable witnesses to the everyday life of warfare and as dramatic works of art in their own right. These images, taken by some of the conflict’s most gifted photographers, will radically change how we visualize the First World War. 

Genres: Photography, History, World War I, Art

280 pages, Hardcover

First published June 5, 2015

About the author

Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. He was educated at the local Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, short-listed for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (winner of the 2004 W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award), and The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography), and Zona (about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker). His collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012. He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. A new book, Another Great Day at Sea, about life aboard the USS George H W Bush has just been published by Pantheon.
In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2009 he was the recipient of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Best Comic Novel and the GQ Writer of the Year Award (for Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi). His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. His website is geoffdyer.com

Reviews

[Frederic · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunningly beautiful book of often disturbing photographs of the First World War. These are large-scale prints from medium-format glass-plate negatives, really amazingly sharp and detailed. The wide range of subjects seeks to expand our image of the war, including civilian children, materiel production, and of course a variety of destruction (including a number of post-mortem portraits). Many of the plates do span two facing pages, but the production of the book is so good that there is very little loss to the gutter. There are also some autochromes, early color photographs. Brief introductory text, with grouped captions by section and brief biographies of the photographers. Produced in conjunction with an exhibit in Belgium, it's good to have this more widely available.

[Stephanie Griffin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Photos are too dark. I would think the publisher would lighten them up a bit so we could see more detail.

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cuts most pictures in half with the spine, but otherwise excellent, with good delineation between the different photographers.