Telling war

Photograph by Sergeant D M Smith, Army Film and Photographic Unit, World War Two, North West Europe, 1944

From October 8^th to November 4^th

Curator: Adrien Jaulmes
Designer: Laurent Hochberg
Documentation: Raechel Isolda

The first war correspondents made their appearance on the battlefield a little over a century and a half ago. These journalists were sent to report on conflicts by the burgeoning news media, and the technologies available to them developed rapidly. Telegraphic communications and glass plate photographs requiring long exposure times were succeeded by photographic, transmission and distribution technologies of ever-increasing speed. Newspapers and photographs were joined by radio, and then film, and television, culminating in the immediacy of the internet. Nevertheless, the context in which these journalists work has remained remarkably similar: enormous and ever-changing constraints in the most unpredictable conditions which can exist – those of war. The confusion between perception and reality, rumours and propaganda, the risks of being on the front line – the challenges have not really changed, and the profession is still a milieu of individuals rather than of large institutions.
This unusual and to a large extent hitherto unseen exhibition follows the evolution of a very particular profession, from the Crimean Expedition to the war in Syria. Alongside the technologies and equipment used, the exhibition tells the story above all of the men and women who have been traipsing battlefields since the middle of the nineteenth century in an attempt to ‘telling war’.

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Hôtel du Doyen
Rue Lambert-Leforestier
Open every day from October 8^th to 14^th
Open every weekend from October 15^th to November 4^th
10 am to 12.30 pm and 2 pm to 6 pm

Exceptionally open Friday October 12^th until 7 pm and Saturday October 13^th from 10 am to 6 pm

Free admission

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With the help of