Frank Hurley was an Australian photographer and filmmaker who arrived on the Western Front in August 1917 with a camera, a diary, and an assignment that would define his career. The Australian Imperial Force (AIF) had appointed him as their official photographer, tasking him with documenting the experiences of Australian soldiers fighting in one of history’s deadliest conflicts. He boarded the staff train from London’s Charing Cross station on August 21st, 1917, surrounded by generals, colonels, and majors, and crossed the Channel aboard the Princess Victoria with a heavy load of photographic equipment in tow.
The Western Front that Hurley entered was a landscape almost unrecognizable as Earth. Villages had been reduced to rubble. Trees were stripped bare by shellfire. The contours of the land itself had been rearranged by months of bombardment. When Hurley visited the area around Voormezeele, he described putting on a shrapnel helmet and gas mask just to walk across terrain that had once been farmland. The roar of howitzers was constant, and shells screamed overhead toward enemy lines as he worked.
Hurley’s diary entries from this period reveal a man deeply observant of both the military machine around him and its human cost. He noted the staggering waste of resources and manpower he witnessed daily. He set up his darkroom — a hut he called the Billabong — at Steenvorde, where he developed his photographs late into the night. On August 31st, he wrote that ten men had taken three days to build the hut, followed by six more men working for another seven days, a task he believed could have been done in four. Despite the frustrations, he worked through the night, often not finishing until after midnight.
His photographs captured far more than battles. He documented soldiers sheltering in dugouts carved into hillsides, medical teams treating the wounded at advanced dressing stations, artillery crews operating massive guns, and infantry columns marching through the ruins of Ypres. The city of Ypres itself appeared frequently in his work — its destroyed Cloth Hall, its shattered cathedral, its cellars converted into refuges for soldiers seeking any kind of shelter from the relentless bombardment.
The battles Hurley photographed during this period included some of the war’s bloodiest engagements. The Battle of Passchendaele, the Battle of the Menin Road, and the Battle of Broodseinde all took place within his operational area. On September 27th, 1917, he recorded in his diary that Australian troops had advanced over a six-mile front, capturing the village of Zonnebeke. He described the artillery barrage as so intense it “swept the ground like a rake of steel,” and noted that German soldiers holding concrete pillboxes were only dislodged when Australian troops thrust bayonets through loopholes or dropped Mills bombs down ventilation shafts.
One of the most striking aspects of Hurley’s work is its range. He photographed observation balloons floating above the ruins of Ypres, Lewis gun crews firing at enemy aircraft, and German prisoners captured by Australians at Broodseinde. He also created composite photographs — multiple negatives combined into a single image — such as his dramatic piece titled “Death the Reaper,” which presented the war’s destruction in an almost theatrical way. This technique was controversial, but Hurley defended it as the only way to convey the overwhelming scale of what he witnessed.
The roads leading to the front lines were a world unto themselves. Hurley described the Menin Road — a two-mile stretch outside Ypres — as the liveliest walk he had ever taken, with all supplies and ammunition for the Ypres front moving along it under constant threat. He photographed the endless streams of troops, transports, and artillery pieces converging on the sector ahead of each major offensive.
Among the most visceral images Hurley produced were those showing the suffering of the pack horses used to carry ammunition to forward positions. In his diary, he described horses stumbling through knee-deep mud, falling into shell craters and having to be hauled out, while their drivers waded through the slime beside them. Dead horses lay half-buried in the mud alongside broken wagons. Hurley wrote that those who had been at the front long enough passed such sights without a second glance, as though the dead animals were simply pieces of rock.
German aircraft added another layer of danger to Hurley’s work. He recorded that enemy planes bombed Steenvorde repeatedly at night, keeping him awake and disrupting operations at Australian headquarters. Despite this, he continued moving between battery positions, dressing stations, ridgelines, and ruined cities, always with his camera.
The city of Ypres served as a recurring backdrop for Hurley’s work. He and fellow photographer George Wilkins explored its ruins together, photographing the destroyed Cloth Hall, the gutted cathedral, and infantry columns passing through what remained of the streets. By late 1917, Ypres had been so thoroughly destroyed that almost no building remained intact, yet troops continued to move through it daily.
By mid-September 1917, the tempo of operations was increasing sharply. Hurley traveled early each morning to visit artillery positions, observing Australian siege batteries preparing for what was clearly a major offensive. The roads around Ypres and Voormezeele were packed with troops and transport, all converging on the front. He photographed Australian heavy artillery firing from concealed positions, and infantry moving up to their assault positions before the Battle of the Menin Road on September 20th.
Hurley’s photographs of the wounded are among the most direct records of the human cost of the fighting. At advanced dressing stations on Hill 60 and elsewhere, medics worked under fire to treat casualties from battles that produced thousands of dead and wounded in a single day. Hurley photographed these scenes without softening them.
After the Battle of Broodseinde on October 4th, 1917, Hurley photographed German prisoners captured by Australian forces. He also documented the derelict tanks knocked out by enemy anti-tank guns, the artillery pieces hauled forward across captured ground, and the outposts established on exposed ridgelines like Westhoek Ridge. Each photograph represented a specific moment in a campaign that was grinding through some of the worst terrain and weather conditions the Western Front had to offer.
Not every photograph Hurley took was of destruction. He documented the personalities of individual soldiers — men like the one nicknamed “Wild Eye, the Souvenir King” — capturing the humor and resilience that soldiers maintained even in the worst conditions. These portraits gave faces and character to the men behind the statistics of casualties and advances.
The pack horse photograph and its accompanying diary entry stand as one of the most honest accounts Hurley produced. He described drivers leading their animals through thigh-deep mud, horses toppling into shell craters, dead animals lying half-submerged in the slime beside wrecked wagons. The diary entry makes clear that soldiers and photographers alike had become so accustomed to such scenes that they registered them and moved on without stopping.
