The images now associated with World War I—of the slaughter in the trenches, of the disillusionment of the soldiers mired in the muck—did not emerge in the still photographs published during the conflict, thanks in large measure to the stifling censorship. No photographs were published during the war of sodden heaps of the American dead, nor the glazed eyes of the shell-shocked, nor even of the troops vaulting desperately out of the trenches. "At the end of one week's continuous fight [at Chateau-Thierry], in which the American troops were brilliantly engaged, only 24 still photographs had been received at the photographic laboratory from the various units on the fighting front," noted one of the censors at the time. "Even these pictures were very poor and did not indicate in any way that they were taken in a combat zone." What seems...