credited to the photograph, but is due more prop-
erly to the discourses in which the photograph
found itself.
A fuller account of this discourse, as offered for
example by the cultural anthropologist, David D.
Perlmutter, would attempt to explain the specific
context in which the picture was made, namely the
1968 Tet offensive by the Communist North Viet-
namese, which already represented a watershed in
American public debate on the war, and, impor-
tantly, coincided with peak levels of U.S. mortal-
ities. Further, it would elaborate the suppression of
the identity of both men, and how this suppression
aided the image’s iconicity. It would investigate the
ways that the picture’s meanings change with other
information appended to it, and indeed, how it
might have been used to support the war effort.
If it is rare that even popularly known war photo-
graphs such as Adams’s receive careful attention to
the constructedness of their meanings, the photogra-
phy of the war in Indochina as disseminated in
subsequent decades has expanded and challenged
the original image of the war. Particularly note-
worthy is the publication of work by North Vietna-
mese photographers, including Luong Nghia Dung,
Nguyen Dinh Uu, Mai Nam, Le Minh Truong,
Duong Tranh Phong, Dinh Dang Dinh, and many
others. Originally made to depict the resilience and
ingenuity of the Vietnamese nationalist/communist
resistance (both in print and even in the jungle, where
pictures were hung from trees along the Ho Chi Minh
trail), the photographs humanize the North Vietna-
mese in ways unseen during the war itself (with the
exception of the French photographer, Marc
Riboud’s palliative 1970 book,The Face of North
Vietnam), showing their resilience in the face of Wes-
tern aggression that claimed more than 3.5 million
Vietnamese lives from 1946–1975. The North Viet-
namese photographs also illuminate the priorities of
most non-Vietnamese photographers in showing the
war, namely to endorse tacitly the morality of the
war, if not its impact or its tactics.
The numerous regional conflicts across the Middle
East, Asia, Africa, and South and Central America
from the 1960s through the beginning of the twenty-
first century have drawn plentiful, if uneven coverage
by professional war photographers, while coverage
of American wars has veered from World War I
levels of censorship (the 1991 Gulf War) to World
War II style ‘‘embedded’’ reporting (Iraq, 2003).
‘‘Professional’’ war photography has come largely
to consist of conventionalized visual figurations
using the stock tropes of combat developed over the
previous century: smoke and debris, blasted ar-
chitecture, menacing weapons, clamoring action,
contorted faces, sometimes mutilated bodies. The
most venal of this imagery is something close to a
mimicry of pain: by the inverted logic of news under
the sign of entertainment, the more implausible the
photograph, the more ‘‘authentic’’ its depiction.
Such a climate encourages photographers to treat
war photography as bounty hunting, and indeed,
encourages acts of war themselves, as combatants
play to the camera, certain that the photographs
will appear in print and online. Often such ‘‘profes-
sional’’ coverage in Africa, South America, and Asia
unwittingly rehearses older, resilient stereotypes of
exotic primitivism among the peoples of the postco-
lonial world.
Still, the public interest in (read: market for) war
photography does include a place for more discrimi-
nating photographers and for thoughtful, responsive
work. The American photographer, Susan Meise-
las’s 1981Nicaraguareflects on the impact of wars
of liberation on those who fight them, while her 1997
Kurdistan: In the Shadow of Historyinterrogates an
orphaned history through an innovative combina-
tion of texts and photographs. A series of works on
Afghanistan, including the American photographer,
Fazal Sheikh’s 1999The Victor Weeps—Afghanistan,
the British photographer, Simon Norfolk’s 2002
Afghanistan Chronotopia, and the ambitious 2003
work,Warby the collective VII (Christopher Ander-
son, Alexandra Boulat, Lauren Greenfield, Ron
Haviv, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Christo-
pher Morris, James Nachtwey, and John Stanmeyer)
together form a complex consideration of the Amer-
ican-instigated ‘‘War on Terrorism’’ that followed
the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
If photographs of war in the twentieth century
both present history and are present in history, their
own history is one not of forms but of functions,
and functions renewed, to paraphrase the critic,
Michel Frizot. Photographs of war are, in short,
working cultural objects, deployed alternately to
expose and to recall, to plead and to deliberate, to
sanitize and to shock, to register the realities of war
as well as to critique the imagination of those reali-
ties. They become evidence of what they show in
relation to the questions put to them.
War photography has been extensively collected
by American and European institutions including
the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., which
holds the Farm Security Administration-Office of
War Information (FSA-OWI) collection, the Im-
perial War Museum and Victoria and Albert Mu-
seum, London, and the photography department
of the Muse ́e de l’Arme ́e, Paris.
JasonFranciscoWAR PHOTOGRAPHY