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This exhibition comprises rare vintage black & white portraits, selected from Rodger’s iconic work in Africa from 1947 to the late 1970’s, including previously unseen prints from his personal archive and a unique set of valuable prints of his most famous body of work from this period: The Nuba Wrestlers.
George Rodger was born in Cheshire, in 1908. His early working life was spent in the British Merchant Navy, before, as a self-taught photographer, and after a short spell in America, he joined the BBC's The Listener magazine, and, briefly, in 1938, the Black Star Agency.
His ambition was to be a writer, but during the opening days of the Second World War, it was the camera to which he turned. When the first bombs fell on London, operating from a small flat in Swiss Cottage, Rodger photographed all aspects of the air-raids: the evacuations; grueling rescue operations; life underground and, more generally, the lives of thousands of ordinary people, from all backgrounds, as they struggled against the constant threat of further attacks. His pictures of London and Coventry especially were to make his name and brought him to the attention of LIFE Magazine.
Rodger worked for LIFE for the remainder of the war years. In 1941 he covered the Free French forces in North Africa and the war in Eritrea, Abyssinia and the Western Desert. He travelled to Iran, Burma, Afghanistan, North Africa, Sicily and Salerno - where he first met Robert Capa. Both covered the Liberation of Paris in 1944, along with
Henri Cartier-Bresson and David "Chim" Seymour, close friends with shared war-time experiences and a growing sense of frustration at the strict controls placed on photographers by magazines and agencies. In 1947, with a common interest in protecting their freedom of expression, and their copyrights, they founded Magnum Photos which remains still the most prestigious photographic agency in the world today.
Rodger had been hugely affected by the emotional and physical stresses of years of conflict. He had, famously, walked "three hundred miles through the bamboo forests and what seemed like a thousand mountain ranges" to escape the Japanese in Burma, and, as the first photographer to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, he had been deeply traumatized by the experience “of having to perfectly frame the piles and piles of corpses, for the sake of ‘getting the dead into nice photographic compositions’”. Not surprisingly, in the aftermath of war, he would turn his back on what Gilles Peress later called ‘Conflict Photography’.
In an effort to repair his own spirit, and restore his faith in mankind, he set off, in 1947, on a 28,000-mile overland journey from Cape Town to Cairo, "to get away where the world was clean”. He visited Nigeria, Uganda, and Lamberene in Gabon, photographing, from the high hills of Basutoland to the remote Nuba villages of Kordofan in Southern Sudan, the little known, day-to-day existence of the indigenous peoples in South and East Africa. Rodger gained unprecedented access to the Nuba tribe and the Maasai warriors in Kenya; first publishing his extraordinary pictures in National Geographic in 1951. Since his first visit to Africa with the Allied forces in 1941, the continent had remained an enduring passion - he was to return to it again and again for the rest of his life – but his subject-matter would now be wild-life, the landscape, and more especially the tribes; and something of the inseparable relationship between them. George Rodger died, in Kent, on 24 July 1995.