Output details

Making an Ugly World Beautiful: Morality and Aesthetics in the Aftermath

Contribution and context: This substantial and extensively researched chapter was originally written for the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial and has been updated for the recent book Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images published by Photoworks. The essay reached a large audience at the UK’s only major photography biennale. The newly updated anthology brings together a range of essays and interviews with leading international theorists and practitioners. The book is the first significant theoretical and historical resource about the photography of war, in light of the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’, and the new visual culture that has emerged in the last twenty years.

Research imperatives and process: The chapter provides a re-reading of a new genre of ‘aftermath photography’, situating the work of photographers such as Simon Norfolk, Paul Seawright and Sophie Ristelhueber in relation to the cultural context post-9/11, the neoliberal ‘War against Terror’ and the US military tactic of ‘Shock and Awe.’ The essay contributes to the field by offering the first theorized and critical reading of this new genre of practice. It considers the relationship between politics and aesthetics in war photography, and examines such contemporary practices in relation to the legacies of the picturesque and the sublime, and in terms of the tensions between humanism and postmodernism.