Theatre of war

Cecil Beaton's reputation is linked to his legacy as a great stylist-fashion photographer, portraitist of a gilded pre-war generation, the ultimate royal photographer, diarist, transatlantic traveller, set and costume designer, and an intimate with the cast of the swinging sixties from Mick Jagger and Jean Shrimpton to the court of Andy Warhol in New York. One would expect his arena to be backstage, on the film set or in the studio, if not in some palatial drawing room, but during the years of the second world war, from 1939 to 1945, Beaton was at work for the Ministry of Information documenting the bombing of London, the battlefields of North Africa, the Burma campaign and other war zones across the globe.
This publication is drawn from some seven thousand of his prints and negatives from this period that are housted at the Imperial War Museums in London. On the Home Front the debris of the Blitz was a tragic and sometimes surreal subject. Beaton was sent to document the RAF and he captured the heroism of the fighter and bomber pilots. The great shipyards and the energy of wartime production appealed to his sense of national purpose and offered dramatic graphic oppurtunities.
Far from simply fulfilling a duty, Beaton appeared to be energised by the mission. He found the most unlikely situations rich in photographic potential, none more so than the wreckage of war he witnessed in the North African landscape. When he reached India in 1943, from where he was to set out for Burma, he was in fact visiting the jewel of the empire in the final years of the Raj. Beaton's war travels ended in China where he witnessed the stirrings of a vast nation on the cusp of transformation.
The photographs constitute an elegant document of the machinery of war, the generals and their troops, the princes and their tribal followers, the wounded and the workers. From these extraordinary photographs, coupled with extracts from Beaton's diairies of the time, you sense that the maps of far continents are about to be re-drawn. Behind the façade of his style and elegance, Beaton was creating an incomparable document of the passing of an age.