Images of war is a complex photographic genre impregnated with emotion, which unsurprisingly, carries enormous power in determining reality. War imagery carries that extra weight. Departing from the emotion-focused debates on the representation of war/wartime photojournalism and questions about photos’ authenticity, this chapter looks at how images shape both what we know and how we learn about contemporary war, its landscapes, actors, actions and causes. What we suggest in this chapter is that images are indexes of warfare’s mutation, admissible evidence of daily life in a war zone, war trophies and traces of actions, from a particular point of view and at a very particular moment. Photography works as an imaginary quilting point or a common reference, which creates our collective imaginary of heroism, cruelty and suffering.

Co-authored chapter with Andreja Zevnik and published in Linda Ahalland and Thomas Gregory (Eds.), Emotions, Politics and War, London: Routledge, 2015.

https://www.routledge.com/Emotions-Politics-and-War/Ahall-Gregory/p/book/9781138789050