La Grande Guerre | The Great War examines the First World War as a decisive moment in the history of photography. Rather than treating images simply as illustrations of military events, the book considers how the medium entered the machinery of modern conflict: official photographs served intelligence, provocation, censorship, and the manufacture of public consent, while privately made pictures preserved the lives of soldiers and families confronted with sudden danger.

Its subject is therefore twofold. The book addresses photography as an instrument of state strategy, but also as an intimate practice of remembrance. Studio portraits and personal albums give individual faces and domestic continuities a place beside the larger visual record of war. This movement between institutional image-making and vernacular use is central to the book’s significance, showing how photographic meaning was shaped by both authority and personal need.

The volume brings together a diverse selection of images rather than assigning the history to a single photographic author. Ann Thomas, curator of the Photographs Collection at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and Anthony Petiteau, responsible for documentary studies at the Musée de l’Armée in Paris, provide the credited authorship and curatorial framework. Their collaboration places photographic practice in dialogue with military and museum history, while preserving the complexity of a multi-source collection.

Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2014, on the centenary of the war’s beginning, the bilingual English/French hardcover contains 144 pages and 87 colour illustrations in a 28 × 28 cm format. For serious collectors, its appeal lies in this carefully defined historical argument: it records not only what photography showed during the Great War, but how the conflict helped make photography inseparable from modern warfare and from the private work of remembering.