By Linda Kulman

In the waning hours of the Gulf War, Kenneth Jarecke was driving in the desert outside Kuwait City–lost, and dodging buried mines–when he came across a dreadful scene: In a rocket-torn jeep sat a dead Iraqi soldier, hands still gripping the dashboard, his head charred down to his skull. Jarecke, on assignment for Time, lifted his camera to capture the shot. His military minder objected, but the photographer stood firm. "If I don't photograph this," Jarecke recalls saying, "people like my mom will think war is what they see on TV."

Combat photography didn't begin as a quest for the truth. The first war photographer known by name, Roger Fenton, was sent to the Crimea by the British government in 1855 to provide an antidote to the journalistic dispatches of London Times correspondent William Howard Russell, who had been writing about the wretched treatment of Allied soldiers. Yet, says Timothy Kenny, director of research and news history at the Newseum in Arlington, Va., "Russell's work turned out to be much more important in the long run." By the time Fenton arrived a year into the war to shoot his quiet panoramas, Russell's reporting had already done its work.

Less than a decade later, when Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and others began photographing the Civil War, they frequently rearranged scenes. Gardner was known to place a rifle beside a body to improve a photo's composition. At Gettysburg, one of his subjects even performed double duty: In A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep, he was a Union soldier, in Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, a Southerner. (Gardner, unrattled by the death and destruction around him, dragged the body 40 yards on a blanket and cocked the corpse's head toward the camera for the second shot.) Brady, for his part, once inserted the image of an absentee officer into a group portrait and then reshot the picture.

While such staged pictures are frowned upon today, news photography at that time was still emerging from the tradition of illustration. "The photograph is not true, but it tells a story which is accurate," says Marianne Fulton, senior scholar at George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y. Besides, in Gardner's day, composing interesting shots was a necessity–it took five to 10 seconds (compared with a fraction of a second today) to capture an image, which meant that the shots were always going to be static. "That's why you get pictures of a ruined city with one man sitting there," says Fulton. "There were probably other people who walked through the pictures, but the film was too slow to capture them."

Still, Gardner's images made the public witnesses to war in a way that overturned preconceived notions of heroism and glory on the battlefield. A major exhibition of Antietam photos held at Brady's New York gallery just a month after the September 1862 clash "literally stunned the American people," Fulton writes in Eyes of Time: Photojournalism in America. "Most of the photographs dwelt relentlessly on the dead and made graphically tangible . . . not only the unimaginable scale of the slaughter that had occurred but its physical horror and its shabbiness." Critiquing the show, a New York Times reviewer of the era wrote, "If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along streets, he has done something very like it."

As technology improved, so too did the military's control over the press. During World War I, censorship was so severe that "an Allied officer was attached to each correspondent 'whose one and only function, apart from preventing him from seeing anything, was to waste as much time as possible,' " Susan Moeller writes in Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat. Photographers were forbidden to show not only troop movements or materiel but also any images that cast the men in an improper light, "such as a naked soldier in bed in a whorehouse." The military's position: "The average mother sees her own boy subjected to the dangers portrayed . . . and she visualizes her own son in each corpse she sees pictured."

The prohibition against showing American dead continued through the first years of World War II. "Soldiers didn't die," says Harold Evans, guest curator of a Newseum show on war photography (and a U.S. News contributing editor). "They went into battle and they became a name on a war memorial, and they didn't die in between." It wasn't until a month after Pearl Harbor that Americans even saw images of the attack. Even then, the pictures portrayed no human carnage. But in mid-1943, Franklin Roosevelt abruptly reversed the policy, deciding it was time the war came home to steel American resolve. Nearly two years later, Robert Capa shot the last combat photographs of an American killed in Europe. "The last man shooting the last gun was not much different from the first," Capa notes in his memoir, Slightly Out of Focus. "But the boy had a clean, open, very young face, and his gun was still killing fascists."

In Vietnam, photojournalists were restrained not by official censorship but by logistics. "You couldn't go far by road," recalls photographer Philip Jones Griffiths. Authorized to hitch rides on any helicopter, the press still found "on any particular day, at any particular moment, you couldn't always get where you wanted," says Robert Burke, chief of information of the U.S. military command in Vietnam.

In today's international conflicts, the issue is access. Ron Haviv, who has spent 10 years photographing in the Balkans, tells of journalists who went "from being welcome to being targets." A typical day for him includes "at least one arrest by a faction determined to have its side of the story told," he says. Accused of being a spy in Bosnia in 1994, he was interrogated and beaten for three days before being released. Traveling with a paramilitary group in 1992 to document some of the first incidences of ethnic cleansing, Haviv shot pictures of a soldier kicking the town butcher, his wife, and sister-in-law as they lay dying or dead in the street. He managed to smuggle the film out by hiding the roll under a seat in his car. Other film showing a civilian being pushed out a window was confiscated by the commander. And Haviv is one of the lucky ones. At least 11 photojournalists and camera crew members have died in the Balkans alone since 1991.

As for Jarecke (now a contract photographer for U.S. News), his Iraqi soldier picture managed to dodge military censorship, but it never ran on the Associated Press photo wire. The editors chose other pictures instead.