War and Vulnerability: Annotated Bibliography of Visual Cultures
Shahim Sheikh
1. Laurent Rebours. Faris Odeh throwing a stone at an Israeli Defense Forces tank (Untitled). 2000. Photograph.
An iconic photo taken at the Karni crossing during the Second Intifada in October 2000. 14-year-old Faris Odeh throws a stone at an armoured IDF tank that continues to be a symbol of Palestinian resistance and the very history of colonisation — a benighted people, with their backs against the wall, forced to resort to the barest of means to combat a Herculean occupying force. Ten days later, on November 8, Odeh was shot in the neck by Israeli troops while he was throwing stones at them at the same place.
https://www.facebook.com/jewishvoiceforpeace/photos/a.10150125586109992/10161326208719992/?type=3
2. Francisco Goya. The 2nd of May 1808 in Madrid, or “The Fight of the Mamelukes”. 1814. Oil on canvas.
Goya’s vision of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain is revolutionary in its foregoing of perfect form in favour of depicting reality as experienced and remembered. The charging Mamelukes of the Imperial Guard wreak havoc on the rebelling citizens of Madrid in a landscape besieged by anarchy. With his brush, Goya renders war as not an aspirational stage for the display of valour but a violent, chaotic mess that can only be understood as a loss of civilisational mores.
3. Catherine Leroy. An empty helmet in a forest with soldiers in the background (Untitled). 1966/68. Photograph.
In a frame that can easily be mistaken for one out of a Tarkovsky film, French-born photojournalist Catherine Leroy captures a haunting moment of reprieve from the Vietnam War. In the background of a forest laid to waste after what appears to be a night of heavy fighting, four soldiers are huddled up as day breaks in what can only be speculated as them regrouping to help or mourn a comrade. In focus, right in the centre of the frame, lies an empty helmet; belonging to someone who perhaps no longer needs it.
https://dotationcatherineleroy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/032DCL_VietnamUND-2129_24_web-1.jpg
4. Paula Bronstein. Rainbow over Borodyanka, Ukraine. 2022. Photograph.
The town of Borodyanka was heavily bombed in April of 2022, during the Russian army’s advance towards Kyiv. Against the ruins of a building and the radiant twilight sun, the photo presents a scene of uncanny beauty as a wonder of nature towers over a
site of human malevolence. Yet it is also a photo that resists any such romanticisation, as the man with a cigarette shows us, lamentably looking at the rubble, indifferent to the rainbow above.
http://paulaphoto.com/a-devastating-war-in-ukraine/warukraine_final034a/
5. A dog belonging to a Mr. Dumas Realier, dressed as a German soldier, in 1915. 1915. Photograph.
This cheeky photo of a dog in a German soldier’s uniform may be comical, but it depicts one of World War I’s grossly overlooked facts. An estimated 16 million dogs served in the war as cart animals, messengers, trackers, and even as mascots, among a
plethora of roles. A lot of these services provided by dogs took place amidst heavy fire and shelling, rendering them even more vulnerable than any of the soldiers as unlike in. Realier’s dog, they neither had any shield nor any uniform to symbolise their unrelenting bravery.
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2014/04/world-war-i-in-photos-introduction/507185/#img21
6. Kevin Lamarque. Anti-war protesters raise their “bloody” hands behind U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on President Biden’s $106 billion national security supplemental funding request to support Israel and Ukraine, as well as bolster border security, on Capitol Hill in Washington. 2023. Photograph.
In raising their voice against the genocide in Gaza, the anti-war protestors on Capitol Hill put up a symbolic act that indicts history. The red hands become a metonymy for not just American support for an ethnic cleaning but its pioneering role in neo-colonialism; while Blinken’s out-of-focus face shows the diminished moral position of a complicit bureaucrat, staunchly indifferent to the opinion of those his government is answerable to.
https://www.reuters.com/pictures/photos-of-the-day/pictures-day-nov-1-2023-2023-11-01/
7. Francisco Goya. Que Valor! (What Courage!). 1809–14. Etching, aquatint, drypoint, burin, and burnisher.
In this etching from Goya’s Disasters of War series, a woman, speculated to be Augustina Zaragoza, stands above a pile of corpses as she lights a cannon. Akin to his two paintings on the Madrid invasion of the Napoleonic army, Goya’s figures are not statuesque or mechanically positioned –- the woman’s stance may symbolise a triumph yet outrightly does not show it as she barely manages to reach her goal. The dead do their part to raise the living.
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/francisco-de-goya-que-valor-what-courage
8. David Douglas Duncan. A family runs from a tank battle on the streets of Seoul (Untitled). 1950. Photograph.
In the view of photojournalist David Douglas Duncan, this is the finest photograph he took of civilians during the Korean war. As South Korean tanks advance against an onslaught of firing, a family with an infant looks for shelter below ground level while another man, possibly injured, looks on. While it effectively captures a moment of intense civilian vulnerability, Duncan’s photo is a harbinger of the morbid relationship that South Koreans have had ever since with underground shelters — the country houses thousands of them in public spaces as asylum in the event of a North Korean aggression.
https://www.life.com/history/korean-war-photos-david-douglas-duncan/
9. Käthe Kollwitz. The Parents. 1921–22. Woodcut on paper.
As part of Kollwitz’s War series of woodcuts made to commemorate the suffering in the wake of the First World War — both, national and her own — this print is a grim visual of a pair of old parents, slumped on the ground, using each other as support
while they struggle to stay upright under the weight of their sadness. Like all other parts of this series, The Parents is decontextualized to show the universality of loss and grief in war. In context, it can be interpreted as a grim visualisation of Kollwitz’s own bereavement, having lost her 18-year-old son, Peter, during the war.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kollwitz-the-parents-p82461
10. Abbas. Tehran. Iran. 1979. Veiled women of the revolutionary militia get military training with guns. 1979. Photograph.
In Abbas’s documentation of the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and its aftermath, this photo stands out as a seminal cultural moment. The military training of women was for the ayatollah, a symbol of the vehemence of his ideological stance — the belief that every member of society was to take part in the establishment of a revolutionary regime. At the same time, the chador-clad image of women here shows the germination of a particular cultural iconography — of the representation of women, even in times of national unrest, through a State-sanctioned vocabulary of propriety.
11. Philip Jones Griffiths. Kids spraying soldiers. Belfast, Northern Ireland. 1972. 1972, Photograph.
Through his eye for documenting conflict and war zones, Griffiths photographed The Troubles as a conflict over literal and figurative borders of religious and national identity. On one side of the border in this photograph are children protesting the occupying British army’s advances in a humorous act of spraying the soldiers with water. There are smiles on both sides yet with very different meanings. For the children, it is perhaps the first act in a lifetime of resistance while for the soldiers, it is symbolic of how trivial they believe the conflict to be.
https://www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/northern-ireland-troubles-capturing-the-conflict/
12. Abbas. Kuwait. 1991. Next to a tank destroyed by US aerial bombing, a dead Iraqi soldier is mummified by drops of oil escaping from wells, set on fire by the soldier’s unit before it retreated. 1991. Photograph.
Like a manifestation of a parable, Abbas’s photo shows an example of the damage caused by the retreating Iraqi army at the end of the Gulf War. An Iraqi soldier, who quite possibly participated in the vengeful act of lighting Kuwait’s oil wells on fire, lies dead on the ground, now unrecognisable from the fruits of his own actions. Against the backdrop of a destroyed tank and towering fires on the horizon, the ecological consequences of war are brought out in what appears to be the scattered detritus of a dystopian wasteland.
https://abbasphotos.org/the-collection/conflicts/the-gulf-wars/
13. Otto Dix. War Cripples (Kriegskrüppel). 1920. Drypoint.
Using his own experiences as a soldier in the First World War, Otto Dix produced a body of work critiquing that seminal event as an unparalleled series of anti-war art. Here in War Cripples, Dix turned the common sight of disabled soldiers in the Weimar Republic into a carnival of the grotesque. Four soldiers, variously maimed and disabled, are viewed as agents of a nation’s downfall, who have not lost an inch of their pride. Instead of eulogising their sacrifices, Dix critiqued German hubris as the reason for the nation’s contemporary state in a painting so controversial that the Nazis destroyed the original. Today, Dix’s drypoint etched copy of it is what remains for us to see.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/69799
14. Richard Mosse. Madonna and Child, North Kivu, Eastern Congo. 2012. Photograph.
In 2011, Richard Mosse began photographing the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo using a now-discontinued Kodak film called Aerochrome, famed for its trippy imagery and whose original purpose was military surveillance in regions of dense vegetation. Mosse’s choice of using a film meant to recognise the enemy in camouflage feels ironic as it captures a conflict where friend and foe have become increasingly confusing, with multiplying insurgent groups across the region. The psychedelic quality of the photograph makes it appear like a moment of gentle repose that is recalled in dreams amidst despair. The vulnerable and the helpless are placed next to each other to paint the cost of war.
https://publicdelivery.org/richard-mosse-the-enclave/
15. George Strock. Three Dead Americans. 1943. Photograph.
The US’s decisive intervention in the First World War had created a myth around American supremacy. In 1943, at a time when publishing photographs of dead American soldiers was banned by government censors, LIFE Magazine published George Strock’s photograph from the Battle of Buna-Gona. It was allowed since President Roosevelt felt that the American public had become out of touch with this catastrophic global reality. Strock’s composition paints an especially harrowing picture of three men having survived the wilderness of the sea, only to lose their lives after having reached land. The sight of three dead soldiers on a beach thus became emblematic of the vulnerability of all lives in a warzone.
https://www.life.com/photographer/george-strock/
16. Willoughby Wallace Hopper. Execution of Burmese rebels (Untitled). 1887. Albumen print.
In 1887, Willoughby Wallace Hooper, then Provost Marshal with the British Expeditionary Force, took this photograph of Burmese rebels being executed by the British army in such a violation of human dignity that a charge of inhumane treatment of prisoners was brought against him. Hooper, apparently, delayed the execution in order to get the perfect shot of the bullets hitting the prisoners. The colonial gaze’s reduction of the human subject into an object of observation and experimentation is disturbingly encapsulated in this instance from the early days of photography’s arrival in the subcontinent.