Artillery observation officer in forward post regulates our barrage during the advance on Woncourt 1914 - 1918

This WWI stereograph by Realistic Travels shows artillery observation officers during the advance on Woncourt. It’s a gray scene; a soldier is in a trench looking up over a ridge into no-man's land. I can imagine what it might have been like to make a photograph at this time. Maybe the photographer wanted to communicate the intensity of war. What was it like to lug the heavy camera equipment around a battlefield, the weight of that box mirroring the emotional weight of the scene? The image looks like a raw, immediate document, an attempt to capture what it felt like to be there. Think of other artist-photographers like Paul Nash or Ansel Adams—they had a very physical relationship to the landscape and to the camera. Ultimately, photography is an embodied practice where the photographer’s vision is translated through the lens into a new image. Like all art forms, photography is a way of seeing, thinking, and experiencing the world.