The Gate of Goodbye

Mortimer, a prominent British Pictorialist, used his darkroom skills to fuel England’s patriotic fervor during World War I. The Gate of Goodbye, his most popular and widely reproduced photograph, depicts war-bound soldiers bidding farewell to their families at London’s Victoria Station. Although such scenes were common during the war years, Mortimer’s photograph is a composite, artfully assembled from more than twenty different negatives—not an outright lie, but an ideologically motivated, aesthetically perfected exaggeration of the truth.