Black and White War albums
Black and White was a late-Victorian illustrated weekly periodical founded in 1891 and incorporated into The Sphere in 1912. The magazine combined fiction and journalism, and competed with other illustrated periodicals of the time such as The Illustrated London News and The Graphic. This mixed format is reflected in the way its editors billed it as “the best engraved, the best written and the best illustrated paper in the world” (Tye 1989, 19-24). The magazine’s mix of genres and reportorial modes is also evident in the way that many of its photographers also worked as illustrators or text-based writers and journalists. René Bull (1872-1942), for example, was originally hired as an illustrator, before covering multiple conflicts in Africa and Asia as a photographer in the late 1890s.
It was with Bull’s assistance that Black and White published a series of four photo albums entitled War Albums. Two albums are devoted to Kitchener’s campaign to crush the Mahdists in Sudan (1896-98), one to the British Navy, and the fourth to the Tirah Expedition against a Pashtun tribal rebellion on the northern Indian border near the Khyber Pass (1897-98) (Foliard 2022, 89). Besides Bull’s pictures, the albums also use photographs given by editors from other publications such as the Navy and Army Illustrated, as well as photographs from other war correspondents and colonial officers. These albums represent an important example of how new technologies (portable cameras with fast shutters and improved halftone printing) and new formal techniques (like snapshots and the arrangement of photos in sequences to narrate the conflict) were all coming together in the late 1890s. Other than a textual narrative with portrait photographs at the beginning of each album, the War Albums reduce text to a bare minimum of information in order to put the focus on the photographs and the photographic series (Foliard, 100-102). The albums were such an important demonstration of how the visualization of colonial conflict was changing during these years that they were even included with the French diplomatic reports on events in Sudan, demonstrating how conflict photography was being constructed through trans-imperial networks (Foliard, 102).
Bibliography:
Foliard, Daniel. The Violence of Colonial Photography. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022.
Tye, J. Reginald. “The Periodicals of the 1890s.” In Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research, ed. J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel, 13-31. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1989.