Client:
Imperial War Museum North
Title:
Contact: George Rodger’s War Photographs
Exhibition charting the photographic career of George Rodger, one of the founders of the Magnum photo agency
Read moreRenowned war photographer George Rodger spent his life travelling the globe as a photojournalist, producing some of Life magazine’s most iconic images.
Telling the story of his work needed to echo the story of his life, from his documentation of life on the Home Front through the pivotal point when he became first photographer to enter Belsen after its liberation and then on through his postwar exploration of the different people and cultures.
The challenge of the exhibition design was to tame the weird angles and scale of the Daniel Libeskind-designed interior at Imperial War Museum North, whilst at the same time utilising its unsettling and disorientating effect to maximise the impact of the seminal moments in Rodger’s life.
The colour scheme of monochromatic greys enhances the beauty of Rodger’s striking black and white images with the bright red accent colour redolent of a Chinagraph pencil on a contact sheet. For the emotionally harrowing collection of Belsen images, a special area with bleached white walls was created to indicate how the intensity of this experience seared itself into Rodger’s mind and fundamentally affected his life from that point on.
On seeing the exhibition, Rodger’s widow, Jinx, was struck speechless by the impact of the photographs, which had not been previously digitised and therefore never printed at a scale where George’s skill and attention to detail were so evident. Her view was that George himself would have been not only impressed with the thought and sensitivity that had been put into the way the exhibition was handled, but he would have also have been startled and gratified at the impact his images had at such a huge scale.
