`Don`t keep the label of a surrealist photographer. Be a photojournalist. If not you will fall into mannerism. Keep surrealism in your little heart, my dear. Don`t fidget. Get moving!`… Henry Cartier Bresson.

Photography with a difference! War photography is not about capturing beautiful landscapes or hills but is all about the moment, the event, the emotion and the reality. War photography captures the images of the armed forces of the nations and the various difficulties and phases of their lives. It captures emotions of civilians and victims of war. It depicts the terror of war, the selfless act of sacrifices and the heroic deeds. War photography was very common during the World wars. A large number of war photographers came into existence during that time. Photographers of this genre put their lives in danger to capture the essence of war. In order to capture these moments on their cameras many photographers have been killed. These photographs serve as a reminder and the evidence of our historical past. Journalists and photographers are protected by international conventions of armed warfare, but history shows that they are often considered targets by warring groups - sometimes to show hatred of their opponents and other times to prevent the facts shown in the photographs from being known. Nowadays with the increasing terrorism in the world, most of the targets are journalists and photographers.

Some of the eminent war photographers are Henry Cartier Bresson, Eddie Adams, Robert Capa, George Roger, David Seymor Kevin Carter, Phillip Jones Griffith, Eugene Smith, Alexander Gardner, Bert Hardy, Carl Mydans and the like.

During the 1800`s war was a good for a photographic business. Soldiers would line up outside studios to have their portraits clicked for their families. There was no possibility for action photography for nealry ten years as the early photographic instruments were heavy and bulky. The 1920`s was a decade of change in photography, both in the evolution of cameras and, hand in hand, the developments of new outlets for the different kind of photographs that they produced. The Leica, on sale in 1925, was small, lightweight and unobtrusive and allowed the user to respond rapidly to changing situations, taking a whole series of pictures on a single film in a matter of seconds. It gave a new freedom and flexibility. In particular it allowed the photographer to try to tell a story through a set of pictures rather than standing back and attempting to sum up a situation in a single shot. Later Freeing the camera from the tripod allowed the photographer to move rapidly and shoot from a wide range of angles - from floor level to climbing every available object to shoot down from - and also to quickly move in close or back away.

Not many Indians were into war photography. Indian war photography was mostly done during the Indo-Pak war in the year 1965. The one name that comes to mind is of Homai Vyarawalla who was the first Indian Lady photojournalist who later became a part of history in the making, capturing World War II, India`s Freedom Struggle leading up to independence and subsequently the hectic days of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Most of the war photographers were army personnel but they were also rare as they were mostly called for duty, so they could not capture those intense and historical moments of war, whether by policy, coincidence or the urgency of the matter. Most of the war photographers for India were British in origin. Harriet and Robert Tytler and Fellice Beato were two British war photographers who captured the damage caused by the First War of Independence / Indian Mutiny of 1857/8. There were apparently no photographers present to record the scenes at the time of the actual fighting or sieges, and both the Tytlers and Beato photographed after the British had brutally subdued the uprising. These images were shown to the public by the Photographic Society of Bengal in 1859, and they were also on show (and for sale) at the Tytler`s home in Calcutta. Beato`s photographs of Delhi, Kanpur and Lucknow have become a part of the mythology of 1857 - as document, nostalgia and archive. There are images of the positions of the gun batteries on the Delhi Ridge, Metcalfe house, the Qudsia Bagh, Kashmiri Gate and Mori Gate bastions that were the sites of ferocious fighting.

Then there was John McCosh, who spent much of his life in India suring the rule of the East India Company. He participated in the second Sikh War, which resulted in the abrogation of the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab. He took photographs while off duty. Margaret Bourke White was an American photojournalist of the early 1900`s. she is very well-known, both in India as well as in Pakistan for her photographs of Gandhi at his spinning wheel and Pakistan`s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, upright in a chair. Sixty-six of Bourke-White`s photographs of the partition violence were included in a 2006 reissue of Khushwant Singh`s 1956 novel about the disruption, Train to Pakistan. Her photographs recorded recorded streets littered with corpses, dead victims with open eyes, refugees with vacant eyes.

Ami Vitale from New York has been based in India for several years now and is producing memorable work from Kashmir, Gujarat and elsewhere. Her pictures have appeared in exhibits and magazines around the world, including the major publications such as Geo, Time, The New York Times, Newsweek, National Geographic Adventure and more. The photography produced in India in the 19th century, apart from constituting a large body of work, is also of exceptionally fine quality. Produced by both British and Indian photographers, professional as well as amateur ones, this body of work is now in the process of revival and reinterpretation.