Photography and War

The identity of photography: Exploring realism in photojournalism

by Siobhan Lyons

Published in the first issue of the Macquarie Matrix Undergraduate Journal

It can be argued that the nature of photography becomes drastically altered, and its identity changes according to the... more It can be argued that the nature of photography becomes drastically altered, and its identity changes according to the uses it is put to. This article will discuss the many aspects of photojournalism that shape and manipulate the current status of photography. Its origin as a means of objective documentation will be critically analysed in relation to its uses in war photography, political agendas and propaganda. The theories of Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, among others, will be drawn on to evaluate the extent to which photography is autonomous, changing and transforming depending on how it is employed. The conclusions drawn from the research show how photography has become a malleable artefact, capable of changing its identity in a post-modern context, and thus posing challenges for our concept of reality.

savaş fotoğraflarının kullanımı bağlamında propaganda ve manipülasyon

by nazım serhat fırat

2007: «Death, lamentation and the photographic representation of the Other during the Second Iraq War in Greek newspapers», International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 10(2), pp. 147-166

by Christina Konstantinidou

This article is part of a wider research project on the cultural and political significance of the photographic... more This article is part of a wider research project on the cultural and political significance of the photographic representations of suffering during the Second Iraq War (2003) in Greek newspapers. The paper examines in detail a particular case study — the `wailing father' photographs — carrying out a socio-semiotic analysis of the signifying practices of news reporting and exploring the visual construction of `death' and `lamentation', accounting for the complex articulation between the particular social/cultural context and the processes of meaning construction. More specifically, the aim of the article is to study the role of the representation of death and grief in war; firstly as a rhetorical tool wielded by the Greek press to support its political and moral stance against the Second Iraq War, and, secondly as a hegemonic device that creates an ambivalent divide between `us' (the `implied readers' identifying with the Western moral virtues of `civilised' humanity) and `them' (the social groups being represented, the `Non-Western World') along the lines of Orientalist bipolar oppositions. The article concludes that the `wailing father' photographs, as a deeply complex mixture of voyeurism, objectification, affective participation, human brotherhood, moral indifference, imaginative compassion, passivity and fatalism, seem to reproduce, in all their confusion, the Western superiority and the Orientalist imagery, but also the moral and political failure to react over suffering and war.

Warfare, photojournalism and witnessing

by Leigh Turner