PARIS — The visual stories of war have mostly been told by men through the lens of correspondents like Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose photographs confronted viewers with the proximity and horrors of combat.
The lesser-known perspective of women in conflict zones is the subject of a new photography exhibition that looks at 75 years of war through images captured by eight female documentary photographers.
The show, “Women War Photographers,” organized in partnership with a German museum, the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, runs through Dec. 31 at the Museum of the Liberation of Paris, General Leclerc Museum, Jean Moulin Museum in the 14th Arrondissement.
“We are a museum of history, not an art center,” said Sylvie Zaidman, director of the Paris museum and curator of the show. “Our objective is to show the continuity of conflict in modern history through the eyes of women.”
Through more than 80 photographs and documents, original newspapers and magazines, the show features the work of prominent photographers whose names may be less familiar to the public than their work.
The earliest images in the show are from the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), in which Gerda Taro was killed in 1937, and the latest are from the war in Afghanistan, depicting the ravages of war alongside ordinary life. Ms. Taro, Mr. Capa’s professional partner and girlfriend, was among the first female photographers to be killed in combat.
Anne-Marie Beckmann, an art historian who co-curated the original (and larger) version of the exhibition in 2019 at the Kunstpalast, said the idea arose when the Düsseldorf museum acquired photographs by Anja Niedringhaus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist killed in 2014 while on assignment in Afghanistan.
“We felt it was important to feature women photojournalists who were underrepresented in research, catalogs and museum exhibitions,” said Ms. Beckmann, who is also a director of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation in Frankfurt. “We chose these women for their singular visual strategies and their artistic eye, which went beyond just communicating information.”
In 1976, before heading to Nicaragua, the American photographer Susan Meiselas joined the international grouping of freelance photographers at Magnum Photos, the Paris-based cooperative agency co-founded by Mr. Capa and Mr. Cartier-Bresson.
“The community around Magnum encouraged me to go out into the world with a camera,” Ms. Meiselas, now 73, said in an interview at the Magnum Gallery in Paris. “I am not someone who parachutes into a full-blown war, but I went to Nicaragua to witness the crushing of a popular movement.”
“It was the unpredictability of history that interested me, and the response of citizens to the possibility of war,” she said. “I was drawn to the making of history and those who were making it.”
A 1979 photograph of hers, known now as “Molotov Man,” is featured in the Paris show. The shot — of a Sandinista rebel preparing to throw a homemade explosive — became a defining image and helped to raise international awareness of the Somoza dictatorship.
“Women have never been the dominant voice in conflicts and will be never be,” Ms. Meiselas said. “But they are encouraged by other women who are out there in the field.”
Christine Spengler, now 77, is an award-winning French photographer and writer who covered the war in Vietnam and Cambodia with two of her contemporaries in the 1970s, at the height of the fighting. (She also worked in Northern Ireland, Western Sahara, Afghanistan and Iraq.)
“I never wore a helmet or a bulletproof vest,” Ms. Spengler said in a phone interview. “With Catherine Leroy and Françoise Demulder, we wanted to be in combat zones. We were as courageous as the men.”
Ms. Leroy, who died in 2006, was said to be the first female war correspondent to take part in a combat jump when she parachuted with the 173rd Airborne into Vietnam in 1967. Ms. Demulder, who died in 2008, gave up a modeling career in France to cover that war. She went on to win the World Press Photo of the Year award for her 1976 image of a Palestinian woman pleading with a gunman in Beirut, Lebanon. Work by both women is part of the exhibition.
Ms. Spengler’s arresting photograph of the devastation in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, after the Khmer Rouge bombing in April 1975 was chosen for the exhibition’s advertising poster and catalog cover.
“It was noon on that apocalyptic day when 250 rockets fell on Phnom Penh in 20 minutes,” Ms. Spengler said. “I took a single photo just as the boy turned around.”
Lee Miller, a New York fashion model who died in 1977, traveled to Europe to cover World War II for Vogue, dispatching images of the liberation of the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps.
Taking a great photograph in a war zone can be a matter of access, an advantage that women have because they are perceived as less threatening than men.
“War is most often dominated by men, so as a woman I could observe without being a threat,” Carolyn Cole, 60, wrote in an email. A Los Angeles Times photojournalist since 1994, Ms. Cole has covered conflicts in Kosovo, Israel, Gaza, Sudan, Liberia, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I sometimes felt invisible, which only helped me gain access,” Ms. Cole said. “I found purpose in being the eyes for those who couldn’t see for themselves the inhumanity of war and the humanity of those caught in the crossfire.”
