Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Out of the Marvellous, or, Scholarship and the Magic Arts
- 1 The Artist and the Terrorist, or, The Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the Baader-Meinhof Group
- 2 The Face, or, Senseless Kindness: War Photography and the Ethics of Responsibility
- 3 Provenance, or, Authenticity: The Guitar Player and the Arc of a Life
- 4 Broomstick Horrors, or, The Fog-Walker in the Wood: Keeping up Appearances in the Great War
- 5 The Strategy of Still Life, or, Art and Current Affairs: Georges Braque and the Occupation
- 6 All This Happened, or, The Real Waugh: Sword of Honour and the Literature of the Second World War
- 7 The Secret Life, or, The Soldier's Tale: Diaries and Diary-Keeping in War
- 8 Like a Dog, or, Animal House on the Night Shift: Kafka and Abu Ghraib
- 9 It's All Fucked Up, or, The Non-Fiction Horror Movie: The Cinema and the War on Terror
- 10 Waiting for the Barbarians, or, The Hospitality of War: Civilisation and Barbarism in the War on Terror
- Index
2 - The Face, or, Senseless Kindness: War Photography and the Ethics of Responsibility
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Out of the Marvellous, or, Scholarship and the Magic Arts
- 1 The Artist and the Terrorist, or, The Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the Baader-Meinhof Group
- 2 The Face, or, Senseless Kindness: War Photography and the Ethics of Responsibility
- 3 Provenance, or, Authenticity: The Guitar Player and the Arc of a Life
- 4 Broomstick Horrors, or, The Fog-Walker in the Wood: Keeping up Appearances in the Great War
- 5 The Strategy of Still Life, or, Art and Current Affairs: Georges Braque and the Occupation
- 6 All This Happened, or, The Real Waugh: Sword of Honour and the Literature of the Second World War
- 7 The Secret Life, or, The Soldier's Tale: Diaries and Diary-Keeping in War
- 8 Like a Dog, or, Animal House on the Night Shift: Kafka and Abu Ghraib
- 9 It's All Fucked Up, or, The Non-Fiction Horror Movie: The Cinema and the War on Terror
- 10 Waiting for the Barbarians, or, The Hospitality of War: Civilisation and Barbarism in the War on Terror
- Index
Summary
When I open my wallet to show my papers pay money or check the time of a train I look at your face.
…
The flower in the heart's wallet, the force of what lives us outliving the mountain.
And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.
John BergerWar photography is the new war poetry. ‘What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?’ The passing-bells are plangent still. They are rung now by the photojournalist. Don McCullin is Wilfred Owen incarnate – Owen, who carried photographs of the dead in his wallet – the foot soldier photographer, the combat veteran who had his own demons to deal with, the haunted witness, attending the roll-call in his darkroom. ‘It was like All Quiet on the Western Front. Men marching through the mist. Men I'd seen killed came up out of the mist of war to join me.’ The photograph is a prophesy in reverse, as Roland Barthes divined. Men-at-arms are shot and shot again, shot in black-and-white. The classic war photographs (photographs of the classic wars) are all in black-and-white. The dead and the wounded bleed black blood; the young bleed into the old; the poison bleeds out, eventually. In the meantime the bodies pile up. Contortionists, they practise composition. We goggle at them and try not to look.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- On Art and War and Terror , pp. 33 - 57Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009