War photography is as old as photography itself. The first pictures we have date from the Crimean War (1853-1856), which started less than two decades after the “official” invention of photography in 1839. Photographic images were also used to document the American Civil War (1861-1865) and the Great War of 1914. Even though some of the images that we have from these two last wars were actually staged, they all remain important historical documents. They provide us with concrete information regarding the logistics of the war while suggesting possible motivations and/or intention on the part of the photographer(s). In my presentation, I will examine a number of images of the Palestinian front during that are currently available at the Library of Congress as part of the albums John Whiting. Those albums present an example of photographic documentation from the Ottoman side, and the British side to a lesser extent thereafter, as they are fully devoted to Palestine and Sinai in the period from 1915 to 1917. Photographs capture a moment that already passed and, yet, remains fixed in time as it appeared to the camera when the lens shutter clicked. In this sense, photographs can tell almost as much of what we see in them as of what we do not. They display important elements to the historians, such as clothing styles, tools and weapons, and have the potential to enrich our historical imagination. Perhaps even more significantly, they capture what we could call the “aura of history.” Carefully organized, Whiting’s albums constitute a narrative of the war. The pictures appear to be carefully planed ahead of time of shooting and focus on officers more than the plight of the soldiers or to actual combat. They present us with an alternate reality aimed at feeding the viewers an ideologically framed perspective. In other words, what we see did not fully reflect the material conditions that prevailed at the military camps or the battlefield. However, the absence of an “authentic” war experience in the photos does not deem them unimportant. On the contrary, being images of actual soldiers, leaders and locations, they enable us to see the aura of the time period both as reflected in the details of the photos and in the photographic ideological intention behind them.