In Soldier Snapshots Jay Mechling explores how American men socially construct their performance of masculinity in everyday life in all-male friendship groups during their service in the military. The evidence Mechling analyzes is a collection of vernacular photographs, “snapshots,” of and by American soldiers, sailors, Marines, and aviators. Since almost all of the snapshots are photographs taken of men by other men, this book offers a unique view into the social construction, performance, and repair of American masculinity. Mechling guides the reader from the snapshots to ideas about the everyday lives of male soldiers to ideas about the lives of men in groups to ideas about American culture. In his introduction Mechling offers his thoughts about how to undertake the interdisciplinary study of American culture; he draws from history, folklore, anthropology, sociology, rhetoric, psychology, gender and sexuality studies, ethnic studies, popular culture studies, and visual studies to reveal the intricacies of how men use their folk practices in an all-male group to manage the paradoxes of their friendship and comradeship under sometimes stressful conditions. Soldier Snapshots begins with a brief history of war photography and establishes the nature of vernacular photography: the snapshot. This is followed by a jargon-free discussion of the key ideas about masculinity and the vernacular practices of men in groups, exploring male friendship, the important role of play in men’s relationships, and the ways “animal buddies” adopted by male friendship groups actually tell us even more about male friendship and issues of trust. In the final section Mechling’s careful analysis reveals how the men employ different folk practices—including rough-and-tumble playfighting, building human pyramids, bathing naked in public, cross-dressing, hazing, and gallows humor—in order to manage their relationships. Regardless of the man’s sexual orientation and sexual identity, the strong heterosexual norm in the military means that the men must find ways to understand and even enact or perform their feelings of bonding while still defining those feelings and acts as heterosexual.

Warrior Ways is one of the first book-length explorations of military folklife, and focuses on the lore produced by modern American warriors, illuminating the ways in which members of the armed services creatively express the complex experience of military life. In short, lively essays, contributors to the volume, all of whom have close personal or professional relationships to the military, examine battlefield talismans, personal narrative (storytelling), “Jody calls” (marching and running cadences), slang, homophobia and transgressive humor, music, and photography, among other cultural expressions. Military folklore does not remain in an isolated subculture; it reveals our common humanity by delighting, disturbing, infuriating, and inspiring both those deeply invested in and those peripherally touched by military life. Highlighting the contemporary and historical importance of the military in American life, Warrior Ways will be of interest to scholars and students of folklore, anthropology, and popular culture; those involved in veteran services and education; and general readers interested in military culture.

Building on the vast research conducted on war and media since the 1970s, scholars are now studying the digital transformation of the production of news. Little scholarly attention has been paid, however, to non-professional, eyewitness visuals, even though this genre holds a still greater bearing on the way conflicts are fought, communicated, and covered by the news media. This volume examines the power of new technologies for creating and disseminating images in relation to conflicts. Mortensen presents a theoretical framework and uses case studies to investigate the impact of non-professional images with regard to essential issues in today’s media landscape: including new media technologies and democratic change, the political mobilization and censorship of images, the ethics of spectatorship, and the shifting role of the mainstream news media in the digital age.

Australian Women’s Historical Photography: Other Times, Other Views examines the photographs produced by six talented women photographers against the historical backdrop of settler violence towards Indigenous Australians, the First Women’s Movement, the Great War of 1914–1918, Australia’s imperial occupation of New Guinea, the final years of Chinese Nationalist Party rule in China and debates about photography’s status as an art form. Women’s works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been down-played or even ignored in existing accounts of Australia’s cultural history, and this study is aimed at rectifying this situation. At the same time, the book demonstrates why amateur works are just as important as commercial works to our understanding of the past. ● Methodologically, the book draws on scholarship from history, art history, anthropology, sociology, gender studies and cultural studies to create an interdisciplinary critical framework that will be of interest to a broad range of academic and archival researchers. It is also a framework that is critically sensible of its own groundings in the postcolonial and feminist present thereby reflecting what is meaningful at any given historical moment. ● Finally, this book responds to the pronounced lack of visibility of Australian realist, documentary and commercial women’s works. The few histories of Australian women’s photography that exist pay more attention to modernist and contemporary works, and when they do mention earlier women photographer’s works, they seldom go into much detail. They also ignore the works of the earliest Indigenous women photographers, women who traveled and made photographs abroad. By presenting a carefully contextualized and detailed study of works by six Australian women photographers who worked in the late colonial era and whose works in all sorts of small and surprising ways chronicled the impacts of some of the periods more disturbing as well as enlightened events, we will not only add to knowledge of Australian women’s photography, we will also broaden and enrich the frames of women’s photography and Australian history more generally.

Israel's occupation has been transformed in the social media age. Over the last decade, military rule in the Palestinian territories grew more bloody and entrenched. In the same period, Israelis became some of the world's most active social media users. In Israel today, violent politics are interwoven with global networking practices, protocols, and aesthetics. Israeli soldiers carry smartphones into the field of military operations, sharing mobile uploads in real-time. Official Israeli military spokesmen announce wars on Twitter. And civilians encounter state violence first on their newsfeeds and mobile screens. Across the globe, the ordinary tools of social networking have become indispensable instruments of warfare and violent conflict. This book traces the rise of Israeli digital militarism in this global context—both the reach of social media into Israeli military theaters and the occupation's impact on everyday Israeli social media culture. Today, social media functions as a crucial theater in which the Israeli military occupation is supported and sustained.

LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.