Horace Nicholls: artist-photographer at war

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Horace W. Nicholls was one of Britain's best known photographers of the early twentieth century. As one of the world's firsttrue photojournalists, his work shaped that of succeeding generations. Nicholls reported the 2nd Anglo-Boer War in SouthAfrica. He established legal copyright in photographs in a landmark court case in 1901. He documented the impact of totalwar on the British people, and, as Britain's first official photographer on the Home Front, had unique access, particularly towomen war workers. After the war, he became the new Imperial War Museum's Head of Studio (Chief Photographer)where he worked to secure and develop the IWM's photographic collections and documented the evolution ofcommemorative activities. Today, many of Nicholls' photographs are familiar but little is known about the man who tookthem. There has been no significant research, publication or exhibition of his work for forty years. 2017 will be the 150thanniversary of Nicholls' birth and the centenary of his appointment as the first Ministry of Information Home Front officialphotographer in the First World War.Nicholls is at the meeting-point of a number of areas of significance for British photographic history. First, as head ofphotography at the new Imperial War Museum, his practice presents a pioneering study in the relations between acommissioning institution and photographer. How was the relationship seen by both parties, how did it develop, and whatwere its legacies? Second, Nicholls presents a study in the early development of the vocabularies of war photography andof photography in a time of war. His documentation of the Home Front, notably women's war work, as well as emergingpractices of commemoration are important themes, and lend themselves to a critical appreciation of photography's role inshaping public understandings of the impact of war on civilians, both at the time and since. Third, Nicholls represents anauthentically British line of photojournalism that was to be blended with practices imported by émigrés in the 1930s to makethe familiar manner of Picture Post. He made no secret of his habit of manipulating photographs, notably by using variousforms of composite printing or collage. An examination of this expressive dimension will enable a clearer appreciation ofNicholls' contribution to the peculiarly British form that photojournalism took in his wake. Important too, is the shiftingground between his role as a factual reporter and propagandist.The study has potential to throw light far beyond Nicholls' biography. Drawing on perspectives from memory studies andcultural history, the history of photojournalism and the reading of photography, it will situate Nicholls clearly in the variousmatrices in which he has a place, including the development of a British cultural identity, the history of photojournalism, theshaping of public opinion and the development of museology.