Description: Explores images by William Ivor Castle, a Canadian official photographer known for staging and manipulating his photographs. It tracks the relationship between Castle and the Canadian War Records Office and exposes several of Castle's manipulated works as he attempted to illustrate the Battle of Vimy Ridge to audiences around the world.
Brief description: Carla-Jean Stokes is an historian of war photography, specializing in the history of Canadian and British official war photographs, as well as the preservation of photographic objects in private and public collections. She works as a curator in the heritage sector, and lives in Vernon, British Columbia, Canada.
Review Quotes: "Carla-Jean Stokes crafts a
narrative that is both familiar and ground-breaking. Many of William Ivor
Castle's famous photos of Vimy Ridge in this book will be familiar to the
reader, but Stokes masterfully explains the story-behind-the-story of the images.
Generations before software made it easy to edit photographs, Castle was
changing and manipulating his First World War photographs to tell a dramatic
story that often differed from the "truth" of the original images. Stokes' work
sheds new light on our understanding of Vimy and wartime photography while
rightfully bringing the photographer into the spotlight." -- Mike Bechthold, RCAF
History and Heritage Office.
understanding of First World War photography. Stokes has written a fine
biography of William Ivor Castle--and an even better analysis of his visual
legacy and the role of his work in shaping the narrative of Vimy for
generations of Canadians." -- Jonathan F. Vance, Western University
"Carla-Jean Stokes [offers] a full sense of Castle's efforts
and their cultural impact. Photography was still in its early days, and Stokes
shares how it was embraced both by soldiers and people in power, who used it to
create a specific narrative. Stokes doesn't condemn Castle; instead, she lays
bare what he did and how. The result is a guide to visual communication in that
era -- and, in a sense, this one, with its own reality- and truth-bending
techniques." -- Canada's History