Equipment improved and there were vast numbers of photographs taken during the First World War but it is strange that few photographers come to mind when writing about it. This is extraordinary given the scale of the action and the devastation wrought. The Australian photographer Frank Hurley (1885-1962) covered the battle of Ypres (1917) and he is credited incorrectly with taking the only color photographs of the First World War. In fact there were a number of other innovators to took quite stunning color photographs of which I was not aware until I started collecting research for this website. Amid the horrors of trench warfare some soldiers did manage to take photographs:

• Henri Barbusse (1873-1935), author of 'Le Feu' (1916) that was published as 'Under Fire: Story of a Squad' in 1917 in the USA, took photographs at the front.
• Josef Sudek (1896-1976) from Prague, who despite losing his arm when fired on by his own artillery during a charge, produced 3 albums of photographs. One of his pictures from 1916-7 shows four soldiers standing round a the base of a tree shattered by shell fire in an empty landscape.
• André Kertész fought in the first World War and took photographs. During service with the Austro-Hungarian Army in the Balkans in 1914-1915, Kertesz photographed his comrades and their activities until he was severely wounded in battle and paralyzed for a year.
• The Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii made true color pictures near the village of Karelia using three-colour separation system. Only two of his photographs are directly connected with the war.

 
  

• Hand colored photographs were widely used for postcards
• The Paget Plate was invented in 1913 and a color effect was achieved by looking at a black-and-white positive through a raster of colored lines - Frank Hurley used this technique.
• The Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii used digichromatography, an astonishing three-color separation system (one glass plate negative, three frames); a process based on the work of the German chemist and physicist Adolf Miethe (1862-1927). Mikhailovich travelled from 1905 until 1915 all over Russia and photographed prisoners-of-war, trains and landscapes.
• Jean-Baptiste Tournassoud (1866-1951), photographed the front lines and in October 1918 was appointed Chief of the Photography and Cinematography Section of the French Army - he used the autochrome process to capture the everyday lifes of soldiers.
• There were other notable French autochromists including Paul Castelnau, Fernand Cuville, Jules Gervais-Courtellemont (1863-1931), Léon Gimpel (1878-1948) and Albert Samama-Chikli.

 
  
 
  
Conclusions 
  
The strange thing about the First World War is that although there are hundreds of thousands of photographs taken, they were published in newspapers globally and a large number of multi-volume illustrated books - is that so few photographs are well known and the photographers are almost totally forgotten.
 
The reason for this may lie in the interests of the writers of the major histories of photography and the fact that they were not aware of the archives, or did not have time to study them. Was the scale of the horror so immense that single images undervalued the scale of the tragedy? The omission from photographic histories has led to the remarkable images that do exist being continually undervalued and ignored.