BY THE outbreak of war the MOI had begun to employ its own group of photographers with a mandate to create a specific stock of images ready for the commercial press market, most notably magazines.
It was a propaganda technique already endorsed by the USA and soon enough it was readily acknowledged how colour pictures provided a power far more intense than black and white images, which although tremendously useful had their limitations and often, claims the author, ‘provided barriers’ to the truth.
By the end of 1945, approximately 3,000 photographs were taken depicting life on the Home Front or at the battle scene. The evidence of mood and moment is there to see in this tremendous book which contains a dramatic selection of 1,500 uncensored images passed to the Imperial War Museum for preservation in 1949.
