From World War I to Afghanistan: Our Servicepeople in Photographs

After the United States entered World War I, photographer Lewis Hine toured several army training camps on assignment for a popular magazine. Hine’s early stop-action picture freezes a man mid-air—capturing a seeming carefreeness among soldiers who are preparing to deploy abroad.

During World War II, the Navy established a program called Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service, or WAVES. It enabled around 100,000 women to play a critical role in the war effort. Here Navy photographer Lt. Wayne Miller has captured the new recruits doing calisthenics. Their outstretched arms evoke the airplanes on which many of them would soon be working as machinist mates and metalsmiths.

Gordon Parks was the first African American correspondent for the Office of War Information, a World War II government propaganda agency. In autumn 1943, he made a series of photographs of the all-Black 332nd Fighter Group, part of the famed Tuskegee Airmen. In this dynamic portrait, the pilot’s pose parallels the line of the airplane, suggesting the effortless connection between man and machine. 

This well-known D-Day photograph is by US Coast Guard Chief Photographer’s Mate Robert F. Sargent. Troops from the First Infantry Division disembark from a Coast Guard landing craft. Carrying heavy equipment, they wade through the waters of the English Channel to reach Omaha Beach in France. The beach is littered with defensive obstacles that the soldiers, under heavy fire, would have to overcome before they could climb and secure the steep bluffs just visible in the background.

This closely cropped, soft-focus studio portrait by an unknown photographer depicts a member of the Women’s Army Corps posing in her uniform. The picture is signed “Doris” in green ink on the top left, and the back of the photograph also reads, in part, “your friend, Doris.” Doris may have passed out copies of this elegant photograph to friends as keepsakes.

Japanese photojournalist Kyoichi Sawada made this photograph in November 1967 while covering the intense days-long battle for Hill 875 in Vietnam. Shot from a low angle, it frames a symmetrically arrayed group of paratroopers aiding a wounded comrade against a thicket of trees in the background. Sawada is one of many photojournalists who would be killed during the war.

This is one of a series of haunting portraits that Canadian photographer Louie Palu made while embedded with the US Marines in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in summer 2008. The tight framing and delicate lighting make it hard to look away from the blank stare of the worn, dirt-caked marine.

This work, amazingly, is a tiny painting. Elisheva Biernoff reproduces a found snapshot of an unidentified American soldier in precise size and detail, including copying the handwritten caption from the back of the faded photograph. It reads: “Me. Wish I was Home”—a sentiment that will no doubt be familiar to those who have served.