On War Photography

Abstract

This dissertation theorizes war photography in order to first determine what war photography is, and then, how war photography contributes to our knowledge of militarism and nationalism. The primary questions include: What is war photography? How is it used to create meaning? What can it do (politically)? How is it used to create histories and store memory? How do its affective flows provoke and distribute emotion and feeling? Where can it be found? The research is concerned not only with the photographs of war, but also images of militarism and securitization. Historic and current practices and theorizations of photography are examined to develop new ways of thinking and seeing politically what photographs can do and how photographs shape the intelligibility of war effects. Studying war photography is one method of studying war and militarism. This dissertation considers what photographic visual representations tell us about war, how we think about war, and how we think of ourselves as a nation through the practice of visually recording and circulating particular images of war. Other questions explored across the chapters concern how we ethically read and understand these images. What does an ethical looking/viewing of war photographs consider? This is a study of war through photography and the art of photographic processes and considers how the visual practice of photography bounds our knowledge of war and militarism, and how these images produce/construct/maintain historical memory.