Malcolm Ross, journalist and photographer: The perfect war correspondent?

Abstract

Malcolm Ross was New Zealand’s first official war correspondent
and from 1915 until the end of the First World War he provided copy to the
New Zealand press. His journalism has been the subject of recent academic
investigation, but Ross had another string to his bow—he was an enthusiastic
photographer with the skill to develop his own film ‘in the field’. It
might therefore be expected that Ross was the ideal war correspondent, an
individual who could not only write the stories, but also potentially illustrate
them with photography from the battlefields. Yet by the end of the conflict
his body of photographs was largely unpublished and unrecognised. This
article looks at Ross’s photography and, in an era when media organisations
increasingly require journalists to be multi-media skilled, asks whether the
role of the writer and image-taker are still two different and not necessarily
complementary skills.