Imperial War Museum North, Trafford Park, Manchester
Until 27th April 2008

George Rodger’s wartime output is so varied and comprehensive that this one-man show is a reasonable overview of the entire Second World War. Presented broadly chronologically, the exhibit begins at home in England during the Blitz and moves through Cheshire-born Rodger’s incredible wartime journey across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia, an odyssey so epic that it makes many a more celebrated chronicler of conflict look like an unadventurous mummy’s boy (or girl). Rodger’s pictures are supported by text, maps, displays, paraphernalia, contact sheets, video interviews, etc. providing context and fleshing out his life and times.

While Rodger’s photographs of the home front are often straight reportage, such as the decimated residential street of “Devastation in Coventry”, they are nonetheless highly effective. While a whiff of the staged sometimes betrays a young man learning his craft, a subtle poignancy is often present, especially in the quieter moments, such as a simple image of waitresses opening up shop in the morning. There is even the odd touch of humour, as with a blind man and his bizarre placards in “Blitz Spirit”. Some of this work appeared in Picture Post, as shown here in tearsheet displays, and Rodger soon caught the attention of US Magazine Life, who hired him as a correspondent.

Rodger’s subsequent coverage of the war in Africa reveals a photographer growing in stature: even when obviously staged, his images can be deeply moving and incredibly powerful, none more so than a uniformed German POW standing reverently by a British pilot’s grave, air wreck in the background. By 1942, we find Rodger in Burma, producing occasionally hard-hitting pictures such as a group of locals looking down at the “Body of a Japanese Airman”. By the time Rodger returned to Europe to cover the liberation of France, Belgium and Holland, the poignancy (women queuing for water, one heavily pregnant) and humour (man smoking a cigarette beneath an umbrella in the “Eruption of Mount Vesuvius”) evident earlier has now taken on an air of mastery. That said, a harrowing photograph of the burnt out remains of a German tank crew at Falaise is a reminder that real horror is never far away.

Despite his apparent wartime ubiquity, Rodger will always be most remembered for his pictures of the liberation of a single location, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. A small boy, squinting at the sun as he walks past a seemingly endless row of emaciated bodies, remains one of the war’s most enduring images. Yet it is another photograph, the pathetic, skeletal lone corpse on the ground, tatty makeshift tents as backdrop, which is the supremely eloquent description of the desperate depths to which humanity had sunk. It shows how imagery can succeed par excellence where words almost inevitably fail. We tend to view the critical debate around imaging war and atrocity as a modern invention of the post-Vietnam, Susan Sontag era, but it isn’t. Photography has wrestled such issues since Roger Fenton began rearranging cannonballs in the Crimea the 1850s. George Rodger, who had to arrange some of these horrific scenes make a picture of them, struggled so much with the ethics of doing so that he subsequently turned his back on war photography.

Throughout the exhibition, one cannot help drawing comparisons between Rodger’s images and those of his contemporaries, in particular the more famous Robert Capa (with whom Rodger co-founded Magnum in 1947). One subject in particular is illustrative of the contrast between the two men: Capa, always in the thick of the action with an eye for the spectacular, took a hugely dramatic photograph of a woman collaborator, followed by a large crowd, carrying her baby through the streets of Chartres. Rodger’s image of a Dutch collaborator is much more subtle, yet somehow much more brutal: at first we look upon an uneventful, everyday scene in a quiet, sparsely populated street. It is only after a second we notice the two figures on the right of the image, savagely dragging their victim along the pavement. Despite lacking the flamboyance of Capa, or the sheer art of Cartier-Bresson, Rodger’s unpretentious photographs are arguably just as successful in their own quiet way. Rodger wrote more than one book about his experiences, with his Desert Journey prefiguring (and doubtless inspiring) the likes of Wilfred Thesiger. A history lesson and a photographic education combined, this exhibition is hugely recommended.

Review by Simon Bowcock