What makes news patriotic? How is photojournalism used in wartime? In a national crisis, the press operates under various forms of censorship. Within these constraints, it continues to produce news in line with what is considered newsworthy. Everyday ‘human interest’ photographs and stories, which tell of bizarre, comic or tragic events, are turned to patriotic ends. The subject of death is transformed by its use in saving the nation; it is accompanied and displaced by more comforting ideas. Originally published in 1991, with the help of full-page illustrations from newspapers and journals, John Taylor looks at the special truth of war news, how it is built on established ways of storytelling, and how photography is used to make it seem real. Taking examples from the First and Second World Wars, the Falklands campaign and present-day accounts of terrorism and crime within the United Kingdom, Taylor shows that aside from legal controls, the press’s own methods bring it close to the official perspective. Drawing on history, sociology and photo-history, War Photography is a well-illustrated account of the place of photojournalism in the news industry and the use of news in creating national identity.

It is all but impossible to think of September 11th 2001 and not, at the same time, recall an image. The overwhelmingly visual coverage in the world's media pictured a spectacle of terror, from images of the collapsing towers, to injured victims and fatigued firefighters. In the days, weeks and months that followed, this vast collection of photographs continued to circulate relentlessly. This book investigates the psychological impact of those photographs on a stunned American audience. Drawing on trauma theory, this book asks whether the prolonged exposure of audience to photographs was cathartic or damaging. It explores how first the collective memory of the event was established in the American psyche and then argues that through repetitive use of the most powerful pictures, the culture industry created a dangerously simple 9/11 metanarrative. At the same time, people began to reclaim and use photography to process their own feelings, most significantly in 'communities' of photographic memorial websites. Such exercises were widely perceived as democratic and an aid to recovery. This book interrogates that assumption, providing a new understanding of how audiences see and process news photography in times of crisis.

Photographic stills of women, appearing in both press coverage and relief campaigns, have long been central to the documentation of war and civil conflict. Images of non-Western women, in particular, regularly function as symbols of the misery and hopelessness of the oppressed. Featured on the front pages of newspapers and in NGO reports, they inform public understandings of war and peace, victims and perpetrators, but within a discourse that often obscures social and political subjectivities. Uniquely, this book deconstructs – in a systematic, gender-sensitive way – the repetitive circulation of certain images of war, conflict and state violence, in order to scrutinize the role of photographic tropes in the globalized visual sphere. Zarzycka builds on feminist theories of representations of war to explore how the concepts of femininity and war secure each other’s intelligibility in photographic practices. This book examines the complex connections between photographic tropes and the individuals and communities they represent, in order to rethink the medium of photography as a discursive and political practice. This book interrogates both the structure and transmission of contemporary encounters with war, violence, and conflict. It will appeal to advanced students and scholars of gender studies, visual studies, media studies, photography theory, cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and trauma and memory studies.

Reporting War explores the social responsibilities of the journalist during times of military conflict. News media treatments of international crises are increasingly becoming the subject of public controversy, and discussion is urgently needed.

Each of the eight chapters takes a period of up to forty years and examines the medium through the lenses of art, science, social science, travel, war, fashion, the mass media and individual practitioners.-Back Cover.