“I can vouch for the fact that the name Magnum had nothing to do with us having a bottle of champagne on the table at the GM.”                         

George Rodger.

His name may not be as well known to most of us as the other co-founders of Magnum – the gentle ‘Chim’, or the swash buckling Capa – with his love of women and whisky – or the reclusive Henri Cartier-Bresson, and certainly not as familiar as British society photographers Lord Litchfield and Norman Parkinson, but George Rodger’s photo journalistic accomplishments, place him at the top of the list of important British photographers.

For four and a half years and in sixty-one countries, this ‘gentleman of photography’ (as he was described by Inge Bondi) worked as a stringer for Life Magazine, covering nearly every theatre of World War ll.

During the London Blitz, he covered Londoners who had to deal with the day-to-day tragedies of their bombed out homes with the customary stoicism and humour of the British. He was also the first photojournalist into Bergen-Belsen – where an estimated 70,000 people died – including Anne Frank.  Fifty years later, Rodger is still incapable of describing what he found there, so I have included part of a BBC radio broadcast by the late Richard Dimbleby, who was with him.

“This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.

“ I picked my way over corpse after corpse in the gloom, until I heard one voice raised above the gentle undulating moaning. I found a girl, she was a living skeleton, impossible to gauge her age for she had practically no hair left, and her face was only a yellow parchment sheet with two holes in it for eyes. She was stretching out her stick of an arm and gasping something, it was “English, English, medicine, medicine,” and she was trying to cry but she hadn't enough strength. And beyond her down the passage and in the hut there were the convulsive movements of dying people too weak to raise themselves from the floor.

“In the shade of some trees lay a great collection of bodies. I walked about them trying to count, there were perhaps 150 of them flung down on each other, all naked, all so thin that their yellow skin glistened like stretched rubber on their bones. Some of the poor starved creatures looked so utterly unreal and inhuman that I could have imagined that they had never lived at all. They were like polished skeletons, the skeletons that medical students like to play practical jokes with.

“At one end of the pile a cluster of men and women were gathered round a fire; they were using rags and old shoes taken from the bodies to keep it alight, and they were heating soup over it. And close by was the enclosure where 500 children between the ages of five and twelve had been kept. They were not so hungry as the rest, for the women had sacrificed themselves to keep them alive. Babies were born at Belsen, some of them shrunken, wizened little things that could not live, because their mothers could not feed them”.

It was an event that still affects George Rodger deeply.

“It was a horror I will never forget.”, said Rodger. “Actually, it was the first of two horrors. After four and a half years photographing the slaughter, stench and grime of war, I was confronted by the horror of Belsen – a horror of such tremendous dimensions, my mind just couldn’t accept it … it was just too great. But it had to be photographed … so the world could see the inhumanity that the God fearing Nazis created. Personally, I have never been able to conceive how any God – or any other Supreme Being for that matter – could possibly allow such disgusting horrors to happen.

“I had to get these pictures published – the World simply had to know. My main concern was that nobody would believe what they saw.

“The second horror was my own attitude.

“The Belsen experience left me completely cold. I thought, my God, this is the end. Either the horror was so great it was impossible for my mind to accept it, or else I had become so hardened by four and a half years of dirt and slaughter, that I just didn’t give a damn.

“I made a promise to myself that day, that I would never take another war photograph again.” 

George Rodger never broke this promise. The pictures he took at Berger-Belsen rapidly became familiar iconic images all over the world – but they haunted Rodger for the rest of his life and he refused to look at them for the following 45 years.

After the war he found he was so drained by the depravation he decided to take a break and spent two years traveling through Africa with his first wife Cicely.

These were the golden years for Rodger, as he recorded the customs and traditions of the tribal men and women with a simplicity and quiet dignity – something that seems to be missing in the world today. His pictures of the Nuba and Masai tribes have continued to appear in magazines around the world, nearly every month for the past sixty years. 

Magnum photographer Inge Bondi writes, “…The photographic theme that recurs in George Rodger’s self-chosen photographic world is that of the wholeness of man and nature. For him the choice was a natural reaction after the destruction of war – yet at that time, none of his Magnum brothers worked on this theme.”

I asked Rodger what he loved most about that time.

“For me it was a time of recuperation. A time to reconnect with humanity, of learning to believe again in the human race – war doesn’t just kill people, it kills the ideals that bind humanities together.

“I love classical music – if I’m allowed to listen to it quietly by myself. It was something I missed during that time – there simply wasn’t a quiet place to relax and listen. Perhaps that’s why I love African music.

“I have no sympathy at all for what young people today call music. It sounds to me like the inside of an iron foundry or something – too close to the sounds of a battlefield.  For me, music must have melody and harmony – like the singing I heard in Africa. After gunfire and bombs, their harmony was so beautiful – those deep, deep voices – completely untrained. Magnificent. You can’t sing in that kind of harmony unless you are working as a single people.

“The forest people – in the higher rain forests about 10,000 feet up – between the Congo and Uganda, sing in absolute natural harmony. They just get together and start singing. Perhaps the atmosphere has something to do with it – the mists drifting through the trees and the heat and the aspect of the thick forest and then this music comes through.  It is really moving.  Totally natural.  Back in this civilization – if that’s what we can call it – it is all so contrived”.

George’s words reminded me of a conversation a young enthusiastic journalist had with Mahatma Gandi, who was asked what he thought of Western civilization. To which he replied he thought ‘It would be a good idea.’

Some people might consider George Rodger’s pictures of Bergen-Belson to be his most significant historically. George believes otherwise. He believes his African photographs to be far more important. 

I asked him if he felt his Belsen pictures achieved anything – perhaps by making people more aware of the horrors of war. He chuckled to himself and thought for a moment before answering.

“I find it extraordinary how short lived the effect of pictures like these really can be. There are people, even today – idiots like David Irving – arguing that the holocaust was just part of a publicity racket and that the ghastly camps never existed – it was all just a publicity stunt.  If I hear anybody say that, I just bring them up here and show them a few pictures and that usually stops the argument! People around the world have become desensitized – so I am a bit dubious that any of my pictures will ever have a lasting effect.  I don’t know”.

We do George!

*An excerpt of Richard Dimbleby’s BBC broadcast from Bergen-Belsen can be heard at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/4445811.stm.