“A traitor”, Fritz Ortlieb war photo album, 1917

Although there was a lively trade with negatives and prints at the front, the majority of amateur photographers were not thinking of a specific recipient but instead photographed what seemed to them to be of documentary value. They recorded what appeared to reflect their experiences of the war. In this way, their photographs contradicted the official image of the war as published in newspapers and magazines.

Violence and death were omnipresent on the fronts in the First World War, and the soldiers had to face this practically every day. The fear of being wounded and their own deaths was constantly present, as was the visual presence of death in the form of “fallen” enemy soldiers and their own comrades. Moreover, they were constantly confronted with violence and death in combat and the actual act of killing; such experiences were completely new and extremely dramatic for most of the recruits of 1914.