George Rodger's War Photographs

Although largely self taught, George Rodger (1908 – 1995) was a uniquely gifted photographer and pioneering photojournalist who never lost his concern and sympathy for the victims of conflict. As a photographer for Life Magazine during the Second World War, George Rodger travelled to most major war zones, photographing what he saw for a distant audience in America. Starting in wartime London, George Rodger’s photographs record his personal journey and growing horror of war as much as the course of the war itself.

After his experiences, especially at Belsen concentration camp, George Rodger sought to abandon war photography. However he could not escape the conflicts of the post war era entirely. His coverage of Palestinian refugees and the Mau Mau in Kenya is as poignant and powerful as that of the London Blitz.

Contact reveals how the challenges and changing nature of photojournalism in wartime shaped George Rodger’s work and experience. It examines his lasting legacy both as a photographer and as co-founder, together with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and David (Chim) Seymour, of the legendary Magnum photographic cooperative agency 60 years ago.

The exhibition features 100 powerful photographs by George Rodger (displayed as prints, lightboxes, projections and banners) supplemented by documentary film, interviews, wartime publications and personal objects lent by George Rodger’s family. Try your skills as a picture editor by creating a photo story from Rodger’s contact sheets taken during the Blitz in 1940, and follow his extraordinary 75, 000 mile journey covering the Second World War on a large map. See on public display for the first time each battle zone personally engraved by George Rodger into his tin hat, his Leica IIIa (the camera that took some of the famous images on display) alongside his Kodak vest pocket camera, believed to be his first. A specially commissioned filmed interview with his widow, Jinx Rodger, will articulate George’s change of direction after the war and illuminate his early Magnum work in the Middle East and Africa.

Contact also features specially filmed interviews with veterans from the north of England whose experiences are reflected in the images shown and who reveal how the experiences of war have shaped their lives (from experiencing the Blitz to serving in Normandy, Burma, the Middle East and Italy and the unsettling effects of the end of the war for those who lived through it).

The exhibition is presented in a landmark building that is itself a visionary symbol of the effects of war. Imperial War Museum North is the first building in the UK by architect Daniel Libeskind and the first new build museum to encapsulate its message in the building design - a world shattered by conflict, a fragmented globe reassembled in three interlocking shards representing conflict on land, in the air and on water. Contact is on display in IWM North’s Special Exhibitions Gallery - an extraordinary and compelling space, unrivalled in the UK. It is one of the largest and most unique temporary exhibition galleries in the country with two aluminium-clad walls that pierce the exhibition space, and a ceiling that plummets in one corner and swoops upward in another.

Meet the Curator: Saturday 9, Sunday 10 February; Saturday 19, Sunday 20 April. -- www.iwm.org.uk