George rodger

He walked miles through the Burmese jungle to escape the Japanese - and was one of the first photographer to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Hale-born George Rodger was working as a 'stringer' or freelance photographer for an agency when the Germans started bombing London in His work caught the eye of Life magazine, who gave him a four week assignment.

The magnitude of his task is described in his book 'Desert Journey' in which he recalls breaking down in the desert:. It was the kind of country where one dies fast without water.

George rodger biography

Never had I seen anything more desolate, and the vastness was frightening. He had no official assistance with travel - or help getting his pictures out of the war zone. In he escaped the Japanese invasion by trekking ' miles through the bamboo forest and what seemed like a thousand mountain ranges'. Rodger returned exhausted, but after taking a year off he was made a staff photographer for Life magazine.

He ended up covering the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in It was an experience which obviously scarred him, as he explained:. When I discovered that I could look at the horror of Belsen — the 4, dead and starving lying around — and think only of a nice photographic composition I knew something had happened to me, and it had to stop. They set up the agency as a co-operative where all members would own the copyright on their pictures.

But it is for his images of conflict that he is best remembered. The Imperial War Museum North is commemorating years since his birth in Hale, with more than one hundred of his photos, documentary film and interviews with his widow and other war veterans. Home Explore the BBC.