Photography, the State, and War: Mapping the Contemporary War Photography Landscape

Abstract

This dissertation explores the ways in which media, visuality, and politics intersect through an analysis of contemporary war photography. In so doing, it seeks to uncover how war photography as a social practice works to produce, perform and construct the State. Furthermore, it argues that this productive and performative power works to constrain the conditions of possibility for geopolitics. The central argument of this project is that contemporary war photography reifies a view of the international in which the liberal, democratic West is pitted against the barbaric Islamic world in a ‘civilizational’ struggle. This project’s key contribution to knowledge rests in its unique and rigorous research methodology (Visual Discourse Analysis) – mixing as it does inspiration from both quantitative and qualitative approaches to scholarship. Empirically, the dissertation rests on the detailed analysis of over 1900 war images collected from 30 different media sources published between the years 2000-2013.