War/Photography': Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath

Abstract

Temporary exhibition, Nov. 11, 2012–Feb. 3, 2013. Traveling exhibition, March 23–June 2, 2013, Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, Calif.; June 29–Sept. 29, 2013, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Nov. 8, 2013–Feb. 2, 2014, Brooklyn Museum, New York, N.Y. Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michaels, curators. War in the modern era is a beast—its grip on the human condition poorly understood, the breadth of its effects immense. From the time of Homer to the twenty-first century the struggle to comprehend the human propensity for war has been ongoing. Since the mid-nineteenth century, war photographs have occupied a central place in that endeavor. Given their immediacy, presumed authenticity, and audience effect, images of war may affect public attitudes even more than film or the written word, historians suggest. The images are capable of lodging in the public memory and, with time, may become meaning-bearing icons. In 2012 the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, mounted “War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath,” an exhibition of nearly five hundred wartime images ranging from daguerreotypes of the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 to photographs of the 2011 civil war in Libya. The display was unprecedented in its size and range; the interpretation was equally ambitious. Over the course of ten years of research Anne Wilkes Tucker and her associate curators examined two thousand images of armed combat to locate five hundred with the “capacity to mentally and emotionally engage viewers' interest and to provoke questions.” They traveled to ninety repositories in Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, and North America. The photographs selected were produced by 280 different photographers from twenty-eight nations. Spanning 165 years, the interpretation reveals the rapidly changing nature of warfare, the equally rapid development of combat photography, and the explosive development of the means of disseminating war photographs. Basic informational labels were placed on the photographs and supplemented when necessary. An exceptional exhibition catalog, War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath (New Haven, 2012), includes all of the photographs as well as several essays and interviews exploring related themes. Historians will welcome sustained attention to the reception and dissemination of, and public responses to, war photographs.