Sur le vif
At the outbreak of World War I, the mobilization absorbed a large part of the workforce of the French press, and many periodicals disappeared. At the same time, new illustrated periodicals were founded and took advantage of the large amount of visual material coming from the front. Sur le Vif was one of these new publications, together with journals such as Le Miroir, L’image de la guerre, and J’ai Vu. (Veray 1993, 112). Sur le Vif was highly illustrated with photographs and sketches, and made the image the central vehicle for reporting rather than merely an illustration (Pichel 2021, 169). The journal was very cheap (.15 francs) and its main audience consisted of women and non-mobilized men, though it was also distributed in hospitals and at the front (Pichel, 28, 43). It published its first issue on November 14, 1914, and continued publishing throughout the war. While Sur le Vif generally mirrored the visual strategies of the illustrated press broadly, it specialized particularly in action shots, and also published a running series of photographs of missing persons in a grid structure in an effort to help the public locate the missing (Pichel, 236-246). It adopted a highly emotional visual and textual rhetoric, and made frequent appeals to patriotism and collective effort. In contrast to the photographic production of the Service Photographique de l’Armée, it was less restrained by censorship guidelines (Pichel, 160-163). It would supplement official pictures with photographs by amateurs sent to it from the front, and would publish violent photographs not just of German corpses but also of French injured and dead. The journal would apparently attempt to elude the censor by submitting page mockups at the last minute in hopes that, given the vast amount of material flowing in, the censors would focus on images that jeopardized operational security rather than good taste.
Bibliography:
Pichel, Beatriz. Picturing the Western Front: Photography, Practices, and Experiences in First World War France. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021.
Veray, Laurent. “Montrer la Guerre: La Photographie et le Cinématographe.” Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains, no. 171, 1993, pp. 111-21. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25730966. Accessed 22 July 2023.