War and Photography

What do we really see when we look at photographs of war? 

To what extent are photographs really capable of changing public opinion?

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. It examines coverage of the Spanish Civil War in the French and British illustrated press, asking whether photographs shaped or were shaped by public opinion and by the cultural and ideological precepts of their time.

War and Photography maintains that the news photography of Spain established the visual vocabulary of war photography as a genre, but that the years since Spain have seen a progressive narrowing in the sphere in which photographs can operate as, at the very least, a kind of witness. Starting with Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier, it examines the progressive erosion of faith in a kind of ‘photographic truth’. In its final pages, it explores the way in which institutional anxiety about the power of visual media resulted in ever tighter restrictions being placed upon photographers in subsequent conflicts in Vietnam, the Falklands and Iraq – even as a far greater revolution, in the form of digital photography, was waiting to unleash its ubiquitous, democratising force.

If the photography of the Spanish Civil War established the genre of war photography, this splendid study shows how to interpret those images as evidence of the social assumptions, anxieties and aspirations that underpinned them… Her subtle and lucid analysis comprehensively undermines the notion of any supposed objectivity inherent in the genre. – Frances Lannon, Times Literary Supplement