War Photography

Contains primary source material.

Discover eight remarkable women war photographers who have documented harrowing and unforgettable crises and combat around the world for the past eighty years. Women have been on the front lines of war for more than a century. With access to places men cannot go, the women who photograph war lend a unique perspective to the consequences of conflict. From intimate glimpses of daily life to the atrocities of war, this exhibition catalog reveals the range and depth of eight women photographers' contributions to wartime photojournalism. Each photographer is introduced by a brief, informative essay followed by reproductions of a selection of their works. Included here are images by Lee Miller, who documented the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald. The first woman journalist to parachute into Vietnam, Catherine Leroy was on the ground during the Tet Offensive. Susan Meiselas raised international awareness around the Somoza regime's catastrophic effects in Nicaragua. German reporter Anja Niedringhaus worked on assignment in nearly every major conflict of the 1990s, from the Balkans to Libya, Iraq to Afghanistan. The work of Carolyn Cole, Françoise Demulder, Christine Spengler, and Gerda Taro round out this collective profile of courage under pressure and of humanity in the face of war.

Bestselling author David Shields analyzed over a decade's worth of front-page war photographs fromTheNew York Timesand came to a shocking conclusion: the photo-editing process ofthe "paper of record,"by way of pretty, heroic, and lavishly aesthetic image selection, pullsthe woolover the eyes of its readers; Shields forces us to face not only the the media's complicity in dubious and catastrophic military campaigns but our own as well.This powerful media mouthpiece, the mightyTimes, far from being a check on governmental power, is in reality a massive amplifier for its dark forces by virtue of the way it aestheticizeswarfare. Anyone baffled by the willful American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan can't help but see in this book how eagerly and invariably theTimesled the way in making the case for these wars through the manipulation of its visuals. Shields forces the reader to weigh the consequences of our own passivity in the face of these images' opiatic numbing. The photographs gathered inWar Is Beautiful, often beautiful and always artful, are filters of reality rather than the documentary journalism they purport to be.

Drawing on the work of Barthes, Eco, Foucault, Baudrillard, Burgin and Tagg, and on the historians of mentalities, War and Photography presents a theoretical approach to the understanding of press photography in its historical and contemporary context. Brothers applies her argument with special reference to French and British newspaper images of the Spanish Civil War, a selection of which is presented in the book. Rejecting analyses based upon the content of the images alone, she argues that photographic meaning is largely predetermined by its institutional and cultural context. Acting as witnesses despite themselves, photographs convey a wealth of information not about any objective reality, but about the collective attitudes and beliefs particular to the culture in which they operate.

Photographic stills of women, appearing in both press coverage and relief campaigns, have long been central to the documentation of war and civil conflict. Images of non-Western women, in particular, regularly function as symbols of the misery and hopelessness of the oppressed. Featured on the front pages of newspapers and in NGO reports, they inform public understandings of war and peace, victims and perpetrators, but within a discourse that often obscures social and political subjectivities. Uniquely, this book deconstructs – in a systematic, gender-sensitive way – the repetitive circulation of certain images of war, conflict and state violence, in order to scrutinize the role of photographic tropes in the globalized visual sphere. Zarzycka builds on feminist theories of representations of war to explore how the concepts of femininity and war secure each other’s intelligibility in photographic practices. This book examines the complex connections between photographic tropes and the individuals and communities they represent, in order to rethink the medium of photography as a discursive and political practice. This book interrogates both the structure and transmission of contemporary encounters with war, violence, and conflict. It will appeal to advanced students and scholars of gender studies, visual studies, media studies, photography theory, cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and trauma and memory studies.

The world was made aware of this because photographers were there to record the terror, bravery, and desolation of the assualt. One of them gave his life doing so.".

There are countless books on war photography, most of them focusing on dramatic images made by photojournalists in combat zones. Photography and War instead proposes a radically expanded notion of war photography, one that encompasses a far broader terrain of geographies, chronologies, practices, and viewpoints. Pippa Oldfied considers photography's fundamental role in military reconnaissance, propaganda, and protest, as well as the exposure of war crimes and the memorialization of war, among other themes. While iconic images by well-known names such as Roger Fenton and Robert Capa are included, the viewpoints of people who have historically been overlooked--women and photographers from diasporic and non-Western backgrounds--are significantly gathered here. As a result, this book offers a nuanced and more inclusive understanding of war as a far-reaching undertaking in which anyone might be implicated and affected. Richly illustrated, with some photos published for the first time, Photography and War offers an accessible and well-rounded introduction to photography's perhaps most contested, complex, and emotive subject.

Cold War Camera explores the visual mediation of the Cold War and illuminates photography’s role in shaping the ways it was prosecuted and experienced. The contributors show how the camera stretched the parameters of the Cold War beyond dominant East-West and US-USSR binaries and highlight the significance of photography from across the global South. Among other topics, the contributors examine the production and circulation of the iconic figure of the “revolutionary Vietnamese woman” in the 1960s and 1970s; photographs connected with the coming of independence and decolonization in West Africa; family photograph archives in China and travel snapshots by Soviet citizens; photographs of apartheid in South Africa; and the circulation of photographs of Inuit Canadians who were relocated to the extreme Arctic in the 1950s. Highlighting the camera’s capacity to envision possible decolonialized futures, establish visual affinities and solidarities, and advance calls for justice to redress violent proxy conflicts, this volume demonstrates that photography was not only crucial to conducting the Cold War, it is central to understanding it. Contributors. Ariella Azoulay, Jennifer Bajorek, Erina Duganne, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Eric Gottesman, Tong Lam, Karintha Lowe, Ángeles Donoso Macaya, Darren Newbury, Andrea Noble, Sarah Parsons, Gil Pasternak, Thy Phu, Oksana Sarkisova, Olga Shevchenko, Laura Wexler, Guigui Yao, Donya Ziaee, Marta Ziętkiewicz