Abstract
War Is Over ! For an iconography of war endings. In comparison with other forms of making images, photography has a narrative symbolism which provides the onlooker with messages where he accepts the meaning from his own unequivocal point of view. People, architecture, artefacts and landscapes that we believe are real, strengthen the symbolic value of images. However, this value relies above all on a reference to an iconographic tradition inherited from Ancient Times and Christian art, which structures our perception of images. All variants of photography, whether they are for art, reports, documentaries or amateur pictures, take up motifs from a collective visual memory which we find in art history. Old art themes are captured by the photograph, and interpreted and up-dated into new visual models. The article gives the example of war photographs about the end of the war, which have produced icons that generate long-term effects in the collective memory. It examines their characteristics and the mode of their impact by showing that the icons borrow from previous motifs found in Classical and Christian paintings.
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