Afterimages: photography and U.S. foreign policy

Abstract

Afterimages is a powerful book. Contained within its brevity are fundamental questions on the way in which we look at the world, how we see it and, more particularly, the way we regard war and US foreign policy over the last half century from Vietnam to the open-ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, clustered within the singular ‘war on terror’. Liam Kennedy notes in his ‘ecology’ of images and photojournalism that ‘as the nature of warfare changes so photography must shift its strategies to reflect this’ (p. 178). Ultimately, he concludes, ‘photography retains the potential to be a critical mirror of international affairs and … will continue to play a significant role in giving form to the intangibilities of war by embodying abstractions and illuminating collective values and assumptions about violence, otherness, and humanity’ (p. 179). Such observations are especially apposite as part of the discussion of an era defined by ‘postphotography’ and the ubiquity of image production in our digital age; they are pertinent too in the age in which war and, to use Mary Dudziak's phrase, ‘war time’, have become more and more ambiguous. Kennedy's book moves through an analysis of several photographers and images from Vietnam, to the low-intensity conflicts of the 1980s, the ‘virtual’ war in the Gulf, the humanitarian crises in the Balkans and to seeming ‘wars without end; … wars without a principal enemy’ (p. 128).