“The camera sees everything – we don’t.” - David Hockney “A photograph is static because it has stopped time. A drawing is static but it encompasses time.” - John Berger People have been drawing since the dawn of humanity, as evidenced in early cave drawings and wall frescos. The development of paper had a major impact on the way that drawing was recorded and distributed. In 1826, the invention of the camera had a profound effect on the world, providing a new way of recording information. In this essay, I will discuss and compare the acts of recording through drawing - the "human eye” - and cameras - the "mechanical eye," drawing on images from periods of time since the early cameras of the nineteenth century. Specifically, I have chosen three periods that relate to human conflicts; the Crimean War, the Vietnam War and the recent war in Iraq. Through these three periods I will explore the developments in technology, and in processes and philosophy of the acts of recording, both by drawing and by lens based media. We begin our discussion in the 1850s, when for the first time we can compare the acts of recording by drawing and photography The Crimean war artist, William Simpson was respected as bringing the reality of war to the British people. He went to the Crimean war and; “he reported faithfully, sometimes disapprovingly on what he saw He preferred accuracy to drama, spirit to extravagance” (Lipscomb, 1999) His famous painting “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (figure 1) was undoubtedly a sustained study, bringing together a number of sketches of the event to provide a full image for the viewer. Conversely, Crimean war photographer Rogar Fenton never captured battles, explosions, and the blood and tears that is a moving image of war The first practical photographic method, daguerreotype, had a process too slow to capture a moving image; it needed to focus for a longer period on an unmoving object. But Michelle Bogre tells us that “If action happened too fast for them to be able record it, they resorted to finding or staging events that symbolically replicated what they had really seen” (2011,19-20) This seems true of Fenton, in his famous photograph “The Valley of The Shadow of Death” (Figure 2) Arriving at the battlefield months after the battle was over, he took two images of the scene; one with, and one without cannonballs, “Photo historians suspect that he and his assistants scattered the all-important cannonballs”, (Bogre, 2011, 20) Phillip Bounds suggests that “unlike other means of communicating, which represent events or things across an appreciable stretch of time, the camera records a single instant in complete isolation from the temporal continuum to which it belongs” (Bounds, 2011). “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” appears very static, as we cannot see evidence of war, such as explosions, army, fighting. We just see the landscape and without close scrutiny for the cannonballs, it has no meaning and context. It is a frozen moment which at best captures the afterm