The latest assignment for my CMM101 class was a media research project. We had to chose a topic that was somehow related to media, research it, and give an oral presentation on it. I decided to do my project on military photographers. When I was still in the Marine Corps, there was a military photographer that was attached to my platoon every now and then. Prior to meeting him, I never really gave much thought to these photographers. Once I actually worked with one, I became curious, and this assignment give me the opportunity to learn a little bit more about them.
When it came time to start researching for the project, I was immediately surprised at the lack of information on this subject's history. There was a decent number of sources describing the job today, but I couldn't find much on the origins of military photographers. Compared to the rest of the jobs in the military, photographers really haven't been around that long, so I suppose that explains this lack of information. As I found out, pictures of the military and its actions started appearing during the Mexican-American War. The photographers that took these photos weren't members of the military, however. Rather, they were civilians who followed the military. This continued until the late 19th century. Starting in the 1880s, the U.S. Army's Signal Corps had soldiers assigned as photographers within it. By the end of WWII, military photographers were well established. Since our presentation was supposed to be between 5 and 10 minutes, I didn't go too in depth on this history. Instead, I talked about the mission of military photographers and some of the things they do.
Overall, this wasn't too bad of an assignment, and I was able to learn more about a topic I really didn't know much about.
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