War is Beautiful--The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict

September 21, 2015
Reading the New York Times every morning over the past decade, Shields (Reality Hunger) began to notice that the large, front-page photos from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq often contained a strange, enchanting beauty. This fascinating selection of those front-page photos reveals that the U.S. newspaper of record helped build the narrative about the public acceptance (and visualization) of those devastating wars. By ordering the brutal and often arresting photos into thematic chapters with titles such as “Nature,” “Playground,” “Father,” “Movie,” and “Love,” Shields finds a new way of talking about the wars. Brightly lit photos of muzzle flashes are followed by the serene, pink sunset behind an Apache helicopter. Shields argues that the beautiful and sublime photos published in such a prominent place as the New York Times front page masked the true horror of the destruction. Shields even traces the newspaper’s complicity in war propaganda back to the ownership of Adolph Ochs and the coverage of the Holocaust during Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s stewardship. An afterword by Dave Hickey calls the war photos corporate folk art and explains how the framing of the pictures lead to a greater distrust of the American military. Shields has crafted a unique visual antiwar polemic exploring the role of the media in shaping contemporary propaganda. Color photos.