George Rodger

A Korongo Nuba wrestling champion, 1949

1949 (printed later)

Pioneering photographer George Rodger co-founded the Magnum agency with his friends Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and garnered worldwide recognition for his own work. A self-taught artist, he first found work for The Listener magazine in the late 1930s. His photographs of the Blitz during World War Two brought him to the attention of Life magazine, who hired him as a war correspondent. He covered the war in West Africa, travelled to Iran, Burma, Sicily, and Salerno, and documented the Allies’ liberation of France, Belgium and Holland. Traumatised by what he witnessed during the liberation of the death camps, he vowed never again to cover war, focusing thereafter on travelling the world with his camera, specifically in Africa, the Middle East and the Far East. His world-famous images of tribes in Saharan and equatorial Africa were published in National Geographic, as well as other major magazines and newspapers across the globe. His work hangs in collections both private and national. Rodger was made an Honorary Fellow of Royal Photographic Society in 1993, and passed away in 1995. Since his passing, his work has been the subject of retrospectives in Tokyo, Paris and London, and at the Imperial War Museum North in 2008. His photography features in exhibitions worldwide.