Montrer l'horreur : le photojournalisme en temps de guerre

Mémoire Arts & média Autres médias

Date de publication :

06/10/2009

Langue :

Anglais

Format :

.doc

Nombre de pages :

24 pages

Niveau :

grand public

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Sommaire :

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To Portray The War: The First Step Of Taking A Photograph
To Construct An Image
To Have An Impact On The Viewer

Résumé :

Virginia Woolf has said « Let's see if, watching the same photographs [of the war], we'll feel the same things ». As for her, women and men both see the war as a barbarism that has to stop. The shock produced by war photographs could mobilize everybody. The photography has replaced the drawing in the press since the First World War. But the profession of photojournalist (of war) was only created in the 1930s. The Spanish Civil War was the first war covered by professional photographers on the frontline and with the civilians on the back and whose photographs were immediately published in Spain and foreign press. Many photojournalists have risked their lives (and many have lost them) taking pictures of human suffering, the consequences of war. They do so confident in the belief that their work will make a difference.

Indeed, war and photography, at least in the twentieth century, have shared an inextricable history. The notion of the visible and the filmic have shared a pre-eminent place in the history of modern war. The priority of the visual in the business of warfare has developed to such an extend the sight itself that it has become a weapon in battles, beginning even to overtake conventional arms in military and strategic importance. Photographs play a decisive role in the outcome of battle, influencing and in turn being influenced by changes in public attitudes to the hostilities. However, there remains a tendency amongst historians to believe that the evidence of the visual is more doubtful than that of the written word. Thus, they are reluctant to confer upon it the status and the authority granted in the textual source. Photography appears to be an hybrid between science and art. The problem underlined by these two different acceptations of the photography is the one of its legitimacy to represent the war.

Is photography an objective way of representing the war? Where is the borderline between what should be seen and what shouldn't? How can we show the most horrible things that could ever exist? For historians, photography has a weak legitimacy to show the war but in reality, photographs have achieved an important power on the shaping of the war. In order to get our own point of view on this paradoxical situation, we will ask in this paper how do photojournalists represent the war ?