This Means War

A powerful show looks at how conflict is pictured

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The decision to mingle images from many eras makes war seem like what it is: a chronic condition, a perennial dysfunction in the family of man. All the same, a bit of chronology is useful for grasping how pictures became so important to our understanding of conflict. As early as 1846, when photography was not even a decade old, a handful of photographers were already sniffing around the edges of the Mexican-American War. But the pictures they made were ghostly daguerreotypes, fragile and one of a kind. It was only during the Civil War that photographers arrived in force, toting cameras with glass-plate negatives that could produce multiple prints. Because their heavy wooden cameras required long exposure times, they couldn't capture movement. But the dead don't move, so scenes of battlefields littered with corpses were possible. These pictures were new, shocking and grimly fascinating. So were images of Southern towns reduced to rubble: postcards from Armageddon. And though the invention of the halftone process for printing photos in newspapers was still some years away, the Civil War pictures were circulated in multiple-edition albums and used as the basis for engravings in the widely seen illustrated press.

With this combination of new hardware, new means of distribution and a dry-eyed willingness to point the lens anywhere, war photography had truly arrived. So had the moral ambiguities it still carries. No sooner had the U.S.S. Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana harbor than William Randolph Hearst, king of the jingoistic press lords, rushed in a photographer to get shots of the wreckage, in hopes it would help instigate a war with Spain. Mission accomplished. By World War I, the demand for dramatic battlefield action shots, something never easy to get, had led to the problem of elaborately doctored scenes, so much so that at least one Australian photographer was transferred away from the front.

The real problem for war photography today, however, isn't staged imagery but image overload. The tidal wave of pictures all around us, with every cell phone adding to the deluge every day, threatens to make even atrocity photos into just more pictures, as morally weightless as the movie stills they so often resemble. For all that, the scores of unforgettable pictures in "War/Photography" make clear that even in a world that contains too many pictures, photos like Walter Astrada's Congolese Women Fleeing to Goma--of a wary mother and a nasty-looking tank headed in opposite directions--still have the power to stir your emotions. They may not be able to compel any particular judgment about the wars they represent, but they can lead you to the recognition that attention must be paid. After that, if photos by themselves can't stop war--and they can't--then the fault is not in our pictures but in ourselves.

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