Two months after his arrival, he accompanies a group from the 92nd infantry regiment (RI) on patrol. Near the village of Teurteli, the infantrymen are attacked by enemy fighters and exposed to fire from assault rifles and rocket launchers. The French soldiers fire back under the watchful eye of Jérémy, who follows the operation closely. At the end of the encounter, he clicks the shutter at the exact moment when the leader of the section is shouting at his men to withdraw and disengage. When the curious infantrymen ask why he did not flee or use his weapon, he answers that he feels safe with them and his role is to do his job while not putting them in danger.

“I wanted to document the tense faces, the atmosphere, pay tribute to the soldiers and show the full intensity of these phases”, he says later.

In more peaceful moments, he exploits all the possibilities of digital photography, capturing faint glimmers and shifting shadows in a starlit camp. He shoots moments of joy in Korioume, when a local man revs up his motorbike to celebrate the departure of the Islamists, but also the dismay of a bomb disposal expert in the centre of Goo, where a motorbike hides the body of a jihadist wearing a belt of explosives.

Photos credits : © ECPAD / Second maître Jérémy

The post “One hundred years of photography in the French Armed Forces”. Twentieth episode. A photographic record of French military operations in Mali. first appeared on The News blog.

For seven months, ECPAD photographers shared the daily lives of French units engaged in supporting the Malian armed forces. They photographed French troop movements, from Bamako to the Ifoghas massif, the recovery of Gao, Timbuktu and Tessalit, visits by French and foreign governments and the involvement of various African partners alongside the French forces.

The official photographers were the only reporters following the operations due to the army staff’s fears of journalists being taken hostage and to control communication about the military operations. Consequently, when hostilities broke out, the only images available were those of the preparations and logistics, and the journalistic world said that Serval was a war without images.

The ECPAD photographs, taken in the heart of the fighting, were only published after the first operations, which journalists had limited opportunities to follow. In the fight against terrorism, control over images — from their production to their circulation — constitutes an additional war zone, especially in the new media.

The post “One hundred years of photography in the French Armed Forces”. Nineteenth episode. Opération Serval. first appeared on The News blog.

The ECPAD team arrives in the devastated city a few days later. They are surprised by the warmth of their reception and the courage of the population. An ECPAD photographer since 2007, senior corporal Jérôme explains:

“Life went on in spite of everything, and the population seemed relatively unaffected, considering the earthquake as one of lite’s chance events”.

On 23 January, a man looking for food heard a small sound beneath the rubble of the hotel. Wismond was quickly located and emergency assistance sent to the site. Jérôme followed the whole operation :

“When the victim emerged, what impressed me the most was the huge silence, from when he came out of the rubble to when he entered the ambulance. It was a very solemn moment, very charged with emotion”.

The young man, very weak, was safe and sound after eleven days beneath the ruins of the building, having survived on soft drinks. Jérôme also captured moments of intense emotion in the rescuers, such as the gesture of the first-aider explaining to his colleagues how he crawled and slid his arm into a hole, touching the survivor’s hand. Photographers reporting on disasters cannot just show the material damage. They have to capture powerful moments, the expressions of victims and rescue workers, like the face of the injured child in the arms of the Paris fire-fighters.

The post “One hundred years of photography in the French Armed Forces”. Eighteenth episode. Relief operations through photographs. first appeared on The News blog.

After a large-scale American military operation, France played an important part in the missions of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in “securing the zones placed under its responsibility to enable the Afghan state to rebuild” and in training the Afghan National Army (ANA), which would ultimately take over in the fight against the terrorists. With 89 soldiers killed between 2001 and 2013, the French army paid a heavy price.

How did the official forces report on this asymmetrical war between conventional western military forces and rebels who blended into the population ?

The ECPAD’s photographers essentially showed the main missions entrusted to the French army: training ANA soldiers, the military and logistical environment, distant combat and soldiers on patrol. In some ways, the war fought by the Taliban insurgents was reminiscent of operations in the Algerian war. The photographic treatment of the two conflicts was very different, however, because here enemy prisoners and deaths were never photographed to avoid providing material for propaganda. Indeed, the embedding of photojournalists from outside within the military depended on the photographers accepting this rule.

The post “One hundred years of photography in the French Armed Forces”. Seventeenth episode. France in Afghanistan. first appeared on The News blog.

Chief warrant officer Janick, who took this photograph, explains:

“What I remember most, even though it is not clear from the image, is that it was extremely cold. We followed these French armoured cars all morning in their mission to secure rood routes. Our fingers and feet were frozen. I remember appreciating the broken sign indicating the way to Sarajevo. This legendary name was imprinted on everyone’s minds at the time. The condition of the sign reflected the city itself: still there, still standing and still functional despite being damaged by the war and the folly of man”.

Like the French soldiers’ armoured vehicle, whose white point indicating that it belongs to the UN force has been hastily scratched off to reveal the khaki underneath, corresponding to the new NATO mandate, everything appears permanently uncertain in the « Balkan cauldron » of the 1990s. À l’image du blindé des soldats français, dont l’inscription à la peinture blanche indiquant son appartenance aux forces de l’ONU a été hâtivement grattée pour faire réapparaître le fond vert kaki correspondant au nouveau mandat de l’OTAN, tout semble toujours incertain dans le « chaudron des Balkans », en ces années 1990.

Shadows passing through the icy cold, a stray dog, a bridge where no trains pass, a road junction free of traffic and road signs indicating very little: desolation is everywhere but life goes on against all the odds.

Des ombres qui passent dans le froid glacial, un chien errant, un pont sur lequel plus aucun train ne passe, un carrefour qui ne connaît plus de circulation et des panneaux qui n’indiquent plus grand-chose : la désolation est partout mais la vie continue, envers et contre tout.

The post “One hundred years of photography in the French Armed Forces”. Sixteenth episode. Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo: The Balkans on fire. first appeared on The News blog.

After a long phase of installation and waiting in the Saudi desert, the allied forces launched Operation Desert Storm on 17 January 1991. An intense campaign of aerial bombardment followed by ground operations resulted in Iraq’s defeat on 28 February. In a coalition of over 930,000 men, France contributed the 14,500 soldiers of the Daguet division. Their mission at the extremity of the allied forces was to take the town of Al-Salman and control the Texas road. They achieved this goal within 48 hours.

The armed forces photographers conveyed an image of Daguet as an operation with a heavy logistical focus. They bear witness to the French forces’ achievement in gathering several thousand men with all their equipment in the Gulf. The images do not fully reflect the considerable difficulty, which was keenly felt at the time, of assembling all these forces. However, they do reveal the power of the allied resources, the action of the French troops and their preparations to meet the feared chemical weapons, which ultimately never materialised.

Photos credits : © ECPAD / Yann le Jamtel; © ECPAD / Michel Riehl

The post “One hundred years of photography in the French Armed Forces”. Fithteenth episode. Desert Storm and Opération Daguet. first appeared on The News blog.

On the morning of 23 October 1983, the eight-storey Drakkar building housing French troops was targeted by an attack that caused the deaths of 58 French parachutists and the Lebanese caretaker’s family. The same day, another attack killed 250 American soldiers. Rescue workers searched the ruins of the building for four days and nights, looking for survivors and the bodies of the victims.

Like a forensic identification officer, Joël Brun, a military photographer, shows the attack site in detail, the search operations, the extraction and evacuation of bodies and the collection of clues to the victim’s identities. While collecting the parachutists’ badges and identity discs helped with identification, the photograph taken by Joël Brun also has a symbolic dimension of posthumous homage

Attributed to Hezbollah or Iran, the attack led to military reprisals, including the aerial bombardment of barracks in the Bekaa plain. The trauma was keenly felt in the French contingent and the memory remains bitter today; all the more so in that the reasons and method of the attack are still difficult to grasp. Western troops left Lebanon in 1984.

Photos credits : © ECPAD / Joël Brun

The post “One hundred years of photography in the French Armed Forces”. Fourteenth episode. The Beirut Barracks Bombings, October 23, 1983 by Joël Brun first appeared on The News blog.

He reenlisted in Algeria in 1956, and was mistakenly allocated to the 10th parachute division in Algiers as a photographer, though he had no experience in this field. Photography became a passion which perfectly matched his strong taste for action and adventure: appointed as Lieutenant-Colonel Bigeard’s official photographer in 1957, he took part in all the parachutists’ and commando groups’ operations. He produced over 30,000 images of the conflict until 1961, depicting the men of the 3rd Colonial Parachute Regiment (RPC), often from a heroic, aestheticised viewpoint.
His images, produced outside the scope of the 5e Bureau intelligence and propaganda unit, escaped the filter of institutional censorship.
Widely used and circulated locally, they sometimes reflect the toughness of the arrests, searches and conflict.
His work is marked by both original formal research and a striking empathy with his subjects. He produced in turn many touching portraits of children and images that sublimate the suffering and helplessness of the parachutists: the photograph of the death of the young Jacques Schneidenbach has similarities with certain representations of the Lamentation of Christ.

Photos credits : © ECPAD / Marc Flament

The post “One hundred years of photography in the French Armed Forces”. Thirteenth episode. Marc Flament: the Algerian War at the heart of military operations first appeared on The News blog.

Although the events described in the report’s captions leave little room for doubt, they cannot have been captured spontaneously. The photograph of two prisoners, for example, is clearly staged. The shears found nearby, which constitute incriminating evidence, have been placed in the arms of one of the men. The image composed in this way is even more explicit and could be used as evidence in a criminal trial. And yet it is the impression of a staged image that dominates, an impression amplified by the fear on the faces.

This was not Flandrois’ only contact with shears: in Oran in 1957 he photographed Opération Cisailles, subject of much media coverage, which pierced the physical boundary separating the Arab and European districts of the city. He took time to capture the event in full: the cutting of the barbed-wire fence by the authorities and then the people passing from one district to the other. Not far from the opening, a psychological operations truck informed people about the army’s role in the villages and drew the attention of people living nearby.

Marc Flandrois photographed military operations many times, but also towns, their inhabitants and the evolving urban fabric, as seen in the photo taken in Algiers during the works of the Constantine Plan.

Photos credits : © ECPAD / Marc Flandrois

The post “One hundred years of photography in the French Armed Forces”. Twelfth episode. Marc Flandrois, a war photographer both in operations and on the fringe of operations. first appeared on The News blog.

Centralised in Algiers, the armed forces film service (SCA) had a team of between seven and thirty operators, who travelled throughout Algeria at the request of the press and information office (BPI), which coordinated their activities. Mostly voluntary recruits, like Claude Cuny, the photographers had to supply images for armed forces newspapers, the international press and propaganda documents produced by the French authorities.

Although they had little access to military operations, they were sent to demonstrate that results were being achieved, photographing prisoner captures, weapons seized and enemy bodies, as in the two photographs showing prisoner surveillance and an interrogation of residents next to the corpses of rebels.

Protecting the population and peacekeeping operations were another major theme. In these images, designed to give legitimacy to France’s presence in Algeria, civilian and military life are closely interwoven. The aim was to show that France was educating, protecting and caring for the population and providing a shield against an enemy that was depicted as barbaric. Teachers and military doctors are recurring themes, helping the Algerian children and women, primary subjects of these images.

Photos credits : © ECPAD / Claude Cuny

The post “One hundred years of photography in the French Armed Forces”. Eleventh episode. Claude Cuny : propaganda through photography and the Algeria War. first appeared on The News blog.