Photo essay: The photography of war
From the section “Nature.” Photo: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times/Redux. From “War is Beautiful” by David Shields, published by powerHouse Books.
For a few years in the 1980s David Shields was a Visiting professor at St. Lawrence University. His first book was fairly “traditional”—sentences of his own prose arranged in chapters —but since then Shields has published books that push the boundaries of traditional writing. Some use extensive clips from other writers. Some are all conversation.
From the section “Father.” Photo: Damir Sagolj/Reuters. From “War is Beautiful” by David Shields, published by powerHouse Books.
“War is Beautiful” is Shields eleventh book and it looks like an art book with its big size and thick white pages. It’s subtitled: “The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict.”
From the section “God.” Photo: John Moore/Associated Press. From “War is Beautiful” by David Shields, published by powerHouse Books.
Shields writes that for decades he was “entranced” by the war photos in The New York Times, but “over time I realized that these photos glorified war through an unrelenting parade of beautiful images whose function is to sanctify the accompanying descriptions of battle, death, destruction, and displacement.”
From the section “Pietà.” Photo Joao Silva/The New York Times/Redux. From “War is Beautiful” by David Shields, published by powerHouse Books.
The sixty-five photos in this book are arranged in ten chapters: Nature, Playground, Father, God, Pietà, Painting, Movie, Beauty, Love and Death. Each photo gets its own page and has no caption until the end of the book.
From the section “Movie.” Photo: Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse-Getty Images. From “War is Beautiful” by David Shields, published by powerHouse Books.
The photos in this post disturbed me even as they show artistic beauty. Is there a lesson here? Shields says he no longer reads The New York Times. I’m not willing to do that but I think I will be a more cautious consumer of front-page images. I’ve always known that war photos are meant to manipulate, almost any photo is. Here’s Shields: “Behind these sublime, destructive, illuminated images are hundreds of thousands of unobserved, anonymous war deaths…” With words we must remember to read between the lines. With photos we must remember to look beyond the image.
From the section “Beauty.” Photo: Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images. From “War is Beautiful” by David Shields, published by powerHouse Books.
Tags: arts, media, photography, war
Scariest picture ever.