Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 09 Apr 2017

The Blitz: The photography of George Rodger introduced by Tom Hopkinson

George Rodger (1908 – 1995) was one of the great pioneering British photo-journalists of the first half of the 20th century. As a young man Rodger joined the merchant navy and it was on his voyages that he started taking photographs to record his journeys. A short and unsuccessful stay in the USA ended when the Depression bit deeply into the employment opportunities for casual workers and on returning to the UK in 1936 he found some work as a photographer for The Listener magazine and also for the legendary Black Star agency.

Rodger would eventually go on to work for the great photographic magazine, Life, and he would build his reputation as a truly great artist. He became famous for his work documenting tribal life in West Africa and his photographs of the liberation of Bergen Belsen are now considered classics of their kind.

However it was Rodger’s photographic record of the Blitz that really gave him the boost he needed to launch his career. The decision by Hitler and the Luftwaffe in 1940 to attempt to bomb the UK into submission, targeting London and other major industrial cities, gave Rodger the chance to document the way the population endured, adapted and survived the onslaught whilst trying to maintain something like a recognisable life.

This collection has an excellent short introductory essay by Tom Hopkinson who was himself a legendary newspaper photo editor who spent some time at the start of World War two as picture editor for Picture Post.  The photographs have been collected together under some thematic headings, including Women At Work, Life On The Streets, Life Underground and The Children’s Blitz. All the images are reproduced here in a series of beautifully judged black and white prints with the minimum of extraneous commentary to clutter them up.

The experience of the Blitz and his later work in the concentration camps convinced Rodger that he couldn’t work on war related assignments any longer and he gave himself over completely to his ethnographic studies in Africa. In 1947 Rodger became a founding member of the highly regarded Magnum agency and became a freelance providing a lot of photographs for National Geographic.

This edition published by Bloomsbury is available on the second hand market for a very reasonable price – under £10 – and that’s genuinely a major bargain.

 

Terry Potter

April 2017