War and visual culture since 1900

Abstract

From earliest times, war has been a central feature of human life and death, and as such has held a privileged place in visual culture. The Lascaux cave paintings in south-west France, estimated to be some 16,000 years old, feature the figure of a dead body pierced by a spear. Even these early avatars of the kind of visual culture we experience today posed questions that are still as pertinent as they were then: what was, and is, the function of visual images of war? To provide information about an ongoing situation? To create a true record of an event? To promote a propagandist vision? To memorialize or mourn an event? Or conversely to celebrate and glorify that event? The evolution of visual representations of conflict and its aftermath, and their increasing prevalence, particularly over the last century, have complicated concerns such as intentionality, reception and the instrumentalization of visual cultures of war. Indeed, the articles in this issue primarily focus on ‘art’ as an instrument: they pose a number of questions relating to the functions and reception of visual imagery of war: what are the functions of visual representations of war? How is the visual representation used in specific contexts, and how is it read? These questions are not always as straightforward as they may seem. Visual cultures of war have often been subject to manipulation or deliberate falsification (see for example Jerry Kuehl on ‘Visual History Traduced’, JWACS 1:1). Visual history can be partial, revisionist or downright and deliberately wrong. The diverse and evolving ‘national’ narratives of war and conflict have also inflected this debate. As a result, from the representation of the Charge of the Light Brigade, to the Allied film of the liberation of concentration camps, to Abu Ghraib, visual cultures of war have been subject to suspicion and manipulation. State history, ‘official’ history, ‘public’ history – all these have used visual cultures to produce narratives, and indeed metanarratives, through the institutionalization of visual representations of war past and present. Public memorials, museums and exhibitions determine who and what accedes to public memory. Many nations are currently experiencing ‘memory wars’ in relation to the hierarchization of victimhood and martyrdom. Here, visual cultures of war can be seen as closely bound up in the production and dissemination of ideas of national identity and collective memory. There is, of course, by now a well-documented history of pictorial and sculptural debt to previous images of war, but what is new is the very