Killing for Show

Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq

Julian Stallabrass

See firsthand how war photography is used to sway public opinion.

In the autumn of 2014, the Royal Air Force released blurry video of a missile blowing up a pick-up truck which may have had a weapon attached to its flatbed. This was a lethal form of gesture politics: to send a £9-million bomber from Cyprus to Iraq and back, burning £35,000 an hour in fuel, to launch a smart missile costing £100,000 to destroy a truck or, rather, to create a video that shows it being destroyed. Some lives are ended—it is impossible to tell whose—so that the government can pretend that it taking effective action by creating a high-budget snuff movie. This is killing for show.

Since the Vietnam War the way we see conflict—through film, photographs, and pixels—has had a powerful impact on the political fortunes of the campaign, and the way that war has been conducted. In this fully illustrated and passionately argued account of war imagery, Julian Stallabrass tells the story of post-war conflict, how it was recorded and remembered through its iconic photography.

The relationship between war and photograph is constantly in transition, forming new perspectives, provoking new challenges: what is allowed to be seen? Does an image have the power to change political opinion? How are images used to wage war? Stallabrass shows how photographs have become a vital weapon in the modern war: as propaganda—from close-quarters fighting to the drone’s electronic vision—as well as a witness to the barbarity of events such as the My Lai massacre, the violent suppression of insurgent Fallujah or the atrocities in Abu Ghraib.

Through these accounts Stallabrass maps a comprehensive theoretical re-evaluation of the relationship between war, politics and visual culture.

Killing for Show offers:

190 photographs encompassing photojournalism, artists’ images, photographs by soldiers and amateurs and drones
A comprehensive comparison of the role of photography in the Vietnam and Iraq Wars
An explanation of the waning power of iconic images in collective memory
An analysis of the failure of military PR and the public display of killing
A focus on what can and cannot be seen, photographed and published
An exploration of the power and limits of amateur photography
Arguments about how violent images act on democracy

This full-color book is an essential volume in the history of warfare and photography

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 354 • Trim: 9 x 11½

978-1-5381-4180-9 • Hardback • October 2020 • $74.00 • (£57.00)

978-1-5381-4181-6 • eBook • October 2020 • $70.00 • (£54.00)

Subjects: Photography / Subjects & Themes / Historical, History / Military / Iraq War (2003-2011), History / Military / Vietnam War

Killing for Show

Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq

Hardback

eBook

Summary

See firsthand how war photography is used to sway public opinion.

In the autumn of 2014, the Royal Air Force released blurry video of a missile blowing up a pick-up truck which may have had a weapon attached to its flatbed. This was a lethal form of gesture politics: to send a £9-million bomber from Cyprus to Iraq and back, burning £35,000 an hour in fuel, to launch a smart missile costing £100,000 to destroy a truck or, rather, to create a video that shows it being destroyed. Some lives are ended—it is impossible to tell whose—so that the government can pretend that it taking effective action by creating a high-budget snuff movie. This is killing for show.

Since the Vietnam War the way we see conflict—through film, photographs, and pixels—has had a powerful impact on the political fortunes of the campaign, and the way that war has been conducted. In this fully illustrated and passionately argued account of war imagery, Julian Stallabrass tells the story of post-war conflict, how it was recorded and remembered through its iconic photography.

The relationship between war and photograph is constantly in transition, forming new perspectives, provoking new challenges: what is allowed to be seen? Does an image have the power to change political opinion? How are images used to wage war? Stallabrass shows how photographs have become a vital weapon in the modern war: as propaganda—from close-quarters fighting to the drone’s electronic vision—as well as a witness to the barbarity of events such as the My Lai massacre, the violent suppression of insurgent Fallujah or the atrocities in Abu Ghraib.

Through these accounts Stallabrass maps a comprehensive theoretical re-evaluation of the relationship between war, politics and visual culture.

Killing for Show offers:
- 190 photographs encompassing photojournalism, artists’ images, photographs by soldiers and amateurs and drones
- A comprehensive comparison of the role of photography in the Vietnam and Iraq Wars
- An explanation of the waning power of iconic images in collective memory
- An analysis of the failure of military PR and the public display of killing
- A focus on what can and cannot be seen, photographed and published
- An exploration of the power and limits of amateur photography
- Arguments about how violent images act on democracy
This full-color book is an essential volume in the history of warfare and photography

Details

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 354 • Trim: 9 x 11½

978-1-5381-4180-9 • Hardback • October 2020 • $74.00 • (£57.00)

978-1-5381-4181-6 • eBook • October 2020 • $70.00 • (£54.00)

Subjects: Photography / Subjects & Themes / Historical, History / Military / Iraq War (2003-2011), History / Military / Vietnam War

Author

Julian Stallabrass is a writer, photographer, curator and lecturer. He is Professor of art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and is the author of Art Incorporated, Oxford University Press 2006 (updated edition forthcoming), Internet Art: The Online Clash Between Culture and Commerce, Tate Publishing, London 2003; Paris Pictured, Royal Academy of Arts, London 2002; High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s, Verso, London 1999 and Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, Verso, London 1996. On a senior fellowship from the Paul Mellon Foundation, he is currently researching a book about the relations between cultural and political populism.

He is the co-editor of Ground Control: Technology and Utopia, Black Dog Publishing, London 1997, Occupational Hazard: Critical Writing on Recent British Art, Black Dog Publishing, London 1998, and Locus Solus: Technology, Identity and Site in Contemporary Art, Black Dog Publishing, London 1999, and Red Art: New Utopias in Data Capitalism, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 2014. He has written art criticism regularly for publications including the London Review of Books, Art Monthly and the New Statesman.

Killing for Show has its origins in Stallabrass’ curation of the Brighton Photo Biennial in 2008, Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images’, and has been over ten years in the making. He has published extensively in the area over this time, in forms ranging from reviews to catalogue essays, and has edited two books (both 2013) that bear on the subject: Documentary for the MIT/ Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art; and Memory of Fire, published by Photoworks, Brighton. He has also been teaching these subjects at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including the supervision of PhDs.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Preface
Illustrations: Full Captions and Credits
Brief Chronology
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
Chapter 1. The War of Images
Part I. PR
Chapter 2: Operation Snapshot
Chapter 3: From Vietnam to Iraq
Chapter 4: The Triumph of PR
Chapter 5: The Enemy and the Press
Part II. Speed
Chapter 6: Photographic Acceleration
Chapter 7: Don’t Show Me That
Chapter 8: The Look and Speed of War
Part III. Gulag
Chapter 9: Captives on Display
Chapter 10: Black Sites
Part IV. Murder
Chapter 11: Killing Regimes
Chapter 12: Depicting the Guilty
Chapter 13: Patterns of Killing in Iraq
Chapter 14: Circles of Invisibility
Part V. Amateurs
Chapter 15: Instamatic Terror
Chapter 16: Photographic Citizens
Part VI. Memory
Chapter 17: The Iconic Image and Modern Memory
Chapter 18: The Fading Icon in Iraq
Chapter 19: The Great Exception
Chapter 20: Fire and Forget
Part VII. Democracy
Chapter 21: Barbarity and Lies
Chapter 22: Repression and Resistance
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

Killing for Show is an urgent contribution to photographic and war history. Drawing together the barbarous histories of America’s wars in Vietnam and Iraq through an unflinching analysis of the photographic images they produced (and those they didn’t), Stallabrass manages the exceptional feat of writing reasonably and perceptively about a catalogue of mindless cruelty. His incisive readings of a vast, and largely neglected, archive of photographs underpins a persuasive and chilling account of how images of war are used to wage war. Arguing that to resist the ever-expanding reach of our militarism of the image requires a detailed understanding of how killing and showing (and not-showing) interact, Stallabrass provides an agile and uncompromising model of activist looking.

— Mignon Nixon, Professor of History of Modern and Contemporary Art, University College, London

A huge achievement, equal to the subject. This illuminating book recognises the full diversity of photographic material to emerge from the conflicts and provides a more balanced account than any previously available. As a guide to these terrible events, Stallabrass is consistently attentive, judicious, and humane. There are memorable discussions of everything from the formal qualities of North Vietnamese photography to the politics and aesthetics of amateur photography in Iraq.

— Malcolm Bull, Professor of Art and the History of Ideas, the Ruskin School, University of Oxford

In this incisive and insightful examination of the role of visual culture in the depiction of war and violence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Stallabrass delivers a devastating critique of the various ways in which photography is implicated, consciously or not, in the neo-imperial machinations of America and its allies. He draws out the crucial similarities and connections but also the significant differences in how American administrations attempted to manipulate and control the media in the conflicts in Vietnam and South East Asia and those in Iraq and the Middle East as ‘force multipliers’ to enhance their combat capabilities into the wider geopolitical arena and to try to garner support domestically. But he also explores how dissenting voices of independent photographers, artists and citizen journalists have found cracks in the armour of the monolith of state power, and the vital role that these alternative viewpoints play in defending the core values of civic society.

— Paul Lowe, Reader in Documentary Photography, London College of Communication

Julian Stallabrass’s lucid and quietly angry publication…traces complex forms of power and counter-power across the two major US wars of the past half-century…. This book builds on years of work to offer a complex and nuanced historical understanding of its subjects.

— Art Monthly

Julian Stallabrass’s Killing for Show is an exacting, meticulous encyclopedia of war photography. Spanning the decades of the Vietnam War and the so-called War on Terror, the book is a gruesomely detailed analysis of war photography’s double act: both as art and testimony, subject to aesthetic as well as—at least potentially—ethical evaluation. The range of examples covered is breathtaking. It includes the most varied types of photography, from Magnum-type shots to propaganda items, memes and amateur pictures, from leaked footage to pr releases, from embedded collaborator to partisan perspective. It catalogues its developments as a series of relentless horrors hoping for moments of redemption—which remain few and far between.

— New Left Review

In the main Stallabrass does what he sets out to do: to show how images are woven into the very fabric of war and the institutions that support it[.]

— Source Magazine

Features

9/15/21, October Magazine: Julian Stallabrass discussed the book with Mignon Nixon.
Link: https://direct.mit.edu/octo/article/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00430/107286/Killing-for-Show-A-Conversation-with-Julian

3/4/22, New Books Network: Julian Stallabrass was interviewed about the book.
Link: https://newbooksnetwork.com/killing-for-show-photography

Killing for Show

Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq

Julian Stallabrass

Killing for Show

Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq

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