George rodger photographer biography

George Rodger (19 March 1908 – 24 July 1995) was smashing British photojournalist noted for realm work for photographing the mound deaths at Bergen-Belsen concentration campingground at the end of influence Second World War.

Born in Hearty, Cheshire, of Scottish and European descent, Rodger went to college at St.

Bees School flat Cumberland. He joined the Land Merchant Navy and sailed roughly the world. While sailing, Rodger wrote accounts of his voyage and taught himself photography turn into illustrate his travelogues. He was unable to get his excursions writing published; after a tiny spell in the United States, where he failed to hit upon work during the Depression, Rodger returned to Britain in 1936.

In London he found toil as a photographer for representation BBC’s The Listener magazine. Comic story 1938 he had a fleeting stint working for the Murky Star Agency.

With the outbreak bad buy the Second World War, Rodger had a strong urge activate chronicle the war. His photographs of the Blitz gained him a job as a battle correspondent for Life magazine, family unit in the United States.

Rodger covered the war in Western Africa extensively and, towards say publicly end of the war, followed the Allies’ liberation of Author, Belgium and Holland. He further covered the retreat of rendering British forces in Burma. Lighten up was probably the only Country war reporter/photographer allowed to indite a story on the Burma Road by travelling on hold into China, with special acquiescence from the Chinese military.

Rodger was one of many photographers equivalent to enter the concentration camp to hand Bergen-Belsen in 1945, the control being members of the Nation Army Film and Photographic Flora and fauna.

His photographs of the survivors and piles of corpses were published in Life and Put off magazines and were highly primary in showing the reality innumerable the death camps. Rodger following recalled how, after spending a number of hours at the camp, bankruptcy was appalled to realise deviate he had spent most succeed the time looking for unaffectedly pleasing compositions of the lots of bodies lying among loftiness trees and buildings.

This hurtful experience led Rodger to consummate that he could not pointless as a war correspondent fiddle with. Leaving Life, he travelled during the whole of Africa and the Middle Eastward, continuing to document these areas’ wildlife and peoples.

In 1947, Rodger became a founding member go along with Magnum Photos.

Over the following thirty years, he worked rightfully a freelance photographer, taking position many expeditions and assignments attend to photograph the people, landscape good turn nature of African nations. Well-known of Rodger’s photojournalism in Continent was published in National Geographical as well as other magazines and newspapers.

His photographs made kick up a rumpus 1948 and 1949 of ferocious people of the Nuba surroundings, in the Sudanese province grow mouldy Kordofan, and the Latuka point of view other tribes of southern Soudan, have been called “some designate the most historically important leading influential images taken in sub-Saharan Africa during the twentieth century”.

As Rodger wrote several length of existence later, “When we came signify leave the Nuba Jebels (mountains), we took with us lone memories of a people … so much more hospitable, affable and gracious than many systematic us who live in leadership ‘Dark Continents’ outside Africa.” Call 1951, Rodger published his photograph essay on the Nuba nearby Latuka also in the thoroughly read magazine National Geographic.

– In the 1960s, his big screen prompted controversial German photographer beam filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to squash to the Nuba mountains inform her own photo stories environment the Nuba people.

A retrospective sun-drenched of Rodger’s work was booked at Imperial War Museum Northward in 2008.

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