Showing the horror : photo-journalism in war time

Résumé du document

Virginia Woolf said "Let's see if, watching the same photographs [of the war], we'll feel the same things?. As for her, women and men both see the war as a barbarism that has to stop. The shock produced by war photographs could mobilize everybody. Photography has replaced drawing in the press since the First World War. But the profession of photojournalist (of war) was only created in the 1930s. The Spanish Civil War was the first war covered by professional photographers on the frontline and with the civilians in the background. These photographs were immediately published in Spain and the foreign press. Many photojournalists have risked their lives (and many have lost them) taking pictures of the human suffering, which is the consequences of war. They do so, confident in the belief that their work will make a difference. Indeed, war and photography, at least in the twentieth century, have shared an inextricable history. The notion of the visible and the filmic have shared a pre-eminent place in the history of modern war.

Extraits

[...] Women extend their maternal role. The mothers lost their children, the wives wait their husbands. It is women that we see after bombing attacks or mass murders. It is a way to show that even the weakest elements of the conflict are victims and that the enemy doesn't respect anybody anymore. In war-time, every woman is a potential mother or pacifist. We used photographs of women stayed behind the conflict to show the mobilization and the solidarity of the civilians. [...]

[...] To construct an image According to Laurent Gervereau, a crisis of the warlike representation has emerged with photojournalism in war-time. Before the emergence of the photography, the war was represented in the arts and especially in painting by the confrontation of the troops or a panoramic view of all the battle. The photograph, at least at its beginning, couldn't do that because the wars have changed and the installation of the material took too much time[10]. The photography has to deal with its inherent deficiencies. [...]

[...] Perlmutter, Photojournalism and foreign policy, icons of outrage in international crisis . Laurent Gervereau, Montrer la guerre? Information ou propagande . Pierre Favre, Le réel interprété, usage et fonction de la photographie de presse . Caroline Brothers, War and photography . Quotation in War as Promotional Photo Op The New York Times' Visual Coverage of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq in War, media and propaganda, a global perspective by Y.R Kamalipour and Nancy Snow . Laurent Gervereau, Montrer la guerre? Information ou propagande . Laurent Gervereau, Montrer la guerre? [...]

[...] Technological progresses had two different impacts on photojournalism in war-time. On the one hand, it has generalized the use of softwares like Photoshop which permit to modify every photograph. On the other hand, more performant cameras have made possible the instantaneous capture of a photograph. Thus, there are less reconstitutions than before. Today, there is a decline in photographic credibility. Doubts about the presumed innocence of photography began to surface during the Vietnam War, when accusations of treachery that focuses on the media in general, and in a handful of pictures in particular, implicitly acknowledged that images could convey a point of view. [...]

[...] Therefore, they are invisible. They can't be reduced to an image without altering the complexity of the issues. More than a specific point of view, images of war also reveal the cultural background of the photographer and the viewer[11]. Inflected to ensure the most persuasive effect, photographs deal directly with the cultural concerns of the society at which they are directed, both in the subjects chosen for representation and in the way those subjects are portrayed. Such images provide minimal information about what they literally depict, they reflect far more richly upon the attitudes and preoccupations of the society that deploys them and in which they have meaning. [...]