Henry Roberts

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The Lasting Legacy of Bert Hardy’s War Photographs

Bert Hardy: Photojournalism in War and Peace at The Photographers’ Gallery, 23 February – 2 June 2024.
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Some photographers are associated with a single word. For David Bailey, it’s fashion. For Robert Capa, it’s war. For Bert Hardy, however, it’s difficult to attach his output to any one noun. One reason is that, unlike other photojournalists from the last century, he never achieved celebrity status. A more significant reason was his adaptability to whatever subject was presented to him. His long-time collaborator, Tom Hopkinson, once described him as ‘the nearest to an all-round cameraman I ever worked with’.

Hardy’s versatility is apparent in the new exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, Bert Hardy: Photojournalism in War and Peace: the Blitz spirit, postwar family life, celebrity portraits, sporting shots, foreign travel, war. The sweep of subjects in so small a space makes it difficult to appreciate some of the overall themes but taken individually, each photograph has the mark of a major artist. An exhibition of Hardy’s work is long overdue.

Whilst his subjects range widely, Hardy’s style is constant. Even in the theatre of war, he managed to keep his frame still. His images of children in Northumberland and fishermen in Egypt share the same photographic language. His wasn’t the rough and ready style that characterises much twentieth-century photojournalism. Rather, what makes Hardy’s work, and the new exhibition, so compelling is his marriage of artistry and witnessing. There are thousands of photographs of war, but not all of them are art.

As its title suggests, the exhibition is split into two clear halves – photographs of war and those of peacetime, if not quite peace. The eccentricities of British life are on display here, many taken from his time working at Picture Post: two girls laughing at the Blackpool seaside, lovers in a basement flat in Elephant and Castle, a miner and his son in Resolven, South Wales. Each image, sharp, highly contrasted and thoughtfully composed, suggests a photographer with a considered approach to his shutter, not a guarantee in the fast-paced world of photojournalism. An image of the wrestler Dominic Bye being restrained by a referee in 1954 encapsulates Hardy’s style of combining reporting with artistry; it’s clearly a journalistic shot (the out-of-focus rope of the ring in the top corner, the immediacy of the image resulting in its slanted angle) but the fierce expression of its subject and the hidden face of the referee give the image a choreographed look, as if the wrestler was a model standing for a painting.

During the Second World War, Hardy served as a sergeant in the Army Film and Photographic Unity, photographing life on the Homefront as well as the war overseas. Hardy photographed many of the most consequential events of the war’s final months: the battle for Normandy, the Liberation of Paris, the invasion of Germany and the crossing of the Rhine. Following the war, Hardy continued photographing overseas, capturing conflicts and everyday life in a number of countries. He recorded a divided Germany at the beginning of the Cold War, the Greek Civil War and the Korean War, as well as several conflicts that arose at the end of British imperial rule. However, the most powerful images of the exhibition aren’t on the wall but are instead displayed on a table under a glass casing. Beneath the crisply printed images from Cairo, Nairobi and Singapore are the negatives Hardy took at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

Like many other photojournalists at the time, Hardy captured the atrocities of the Nazi death camps with his camera – images of bodies piling high that have since burned into the collective conscience. But why he did not develop them with the rest of his work is questionable. There is an undeniable ethical question in photographing suffering and powerlessness, and there is no greater example of suffering and powerlessness than the victims of the Holocaust. Looking at the original negatives of skeletal bodies brings us closer to the crimes against humanity of the past century, more so than a reproduced print would do.

One walks away from the exhibition not so much thinking of the individual strands of Hardy’s career, but rather marvelling at both the breadth of subjects and consistency of style. (How many people photographed both Belsen and Terry Thomas?) Hardy didn’t have a style so much as a photographer’s eye. “Everywhere I look, and most of the time I look, I see photographs,” he once said. The exhibition is small and, for a career that stretched across decades and continents, modest in its ambition. But one walks away feeling like they are closer to the previous century.
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Henry Roberts is a writer, theatre maker and photographer originally from Lancashire now based in London. His writing on cinema, photography and politics have appeared in The Guardian, Little White Lies, Verso, A Rabbit’s Foot and Metro among other publications. You can follow him on X @henry_roberts6 and Instagram @henry_roberts_photography, or visit his website at henryrobertscreative.com.