Icons of War and Terror: Media Images in an Age of International Risk (Media, War and Security)

Icons of War and Terror: Media Images in an Age of International Risk (Media, War and Security)

John Tulloch

Language: English

Pages: 232

ISBN: 0415698057

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


This book explores the ideas of key thinkers and media practitioners who have examined images and icons of war and terror.

Icons of War and Terror explores theories of iconic images of war and terror, not as received pieties but as challenging uncertainties; in doing so, it engages with both critical discourse and conventional image-making. The authors draw on these theories to re-investigate the media/global context of some of the most iconic representations of war and terror in the international ‘risk society’. Among these photojournalistic images are:

  • Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of a naked girl, Kim Phuc, running burned from a napalm attack in Vietnam in June 1972;
  • a quintessential ‘ethnic cleansing’ image of massacred Kosovar Albanian villagers at Racak on January 15, 1999, which finally propelled a hesitant Western alliance into the first of the ‘new humanitarian wars’;
  • Luis Simco’s photograph of marine James Blake Miller, ‘the Marlboro Man’, at Fallujah, Iraq, 2004;
  • the iconic toppling of the World Trade Centre towers in New York by planes on September 11, 2001; and the ‘Falling Man’ icon – one of the most controversial images of 9/11;
  • the image of one of the authors of this book, as close-up victim of the 7/7 terrorist attack on London, which the media quickly labelled iconic.

This book will be of great interest to students of media and war, sociology, communications studies, cultural studies, terrorism studies and security studies in general.

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ISIS: The State of Terror

The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy

Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

detail from Cellini’s autobiography) as the bookends of his ‘popular but authoritative’ narrative structure in the DVD conversation. The empirical detail as source (the key) reveals the truth: not only the truth about historical moments of extreme creativity, but the truth also about television art history that is both authoritative and popular. This then leads Schama to his third level of risk, and his definition of the iconic: [W]hen these artists are working at . . . a level of white hot

represents collective work in the women’s movement throughout the 1970s, challenging, as the book cover says, ‘the existing impoverished history of art with its narrow and exclusive conception of art and artist’, with the intention ‘to intervene in art history itself’ – both intentions shared by Berger. Berger and the 1970s women’s movement shared the view of art as ‘one of the cultural, ideological practices which constitute the discourse of a social system and its mechanism of power’ reproduced

(p. 18). 112 Did 9/11 ‘change everything’? Thus, the US media circulated both technological and spatial fear of the attack, and by repeated replay increased that fear exponentially. Simultaneously they were complicit in the move to militaristic excess, with the US acting in revenge mode. As Kellner writes of Baudrillard: For many of us, the Bush administration did what Baudrillard said the terrorists would want them to do, in terms of overreaction to the 9/11 attacks that would melt the

intelligence. So, ‘Frank on cape cod’ says ‘Jennifer Eccleston is an independent journalist and chooses to go to the hot spots and makes them hotter’. The common theme is of Fox sending her to ‘hot spots’; while the repeated fan anxiety is for her to be safe and out of harm’s way. In addition, Scott (a fan) writes: I’m a lawyer from Cleveland, Ohio and I am ready to join the Marines for the chance to be near Jennifer Eccleston. A small price to pay. Jennifer possesses Shock doctrine in Iraq

several kinds of continuity-within-change evident in the circulation of the images taken at Abu Ghraib. First, they were initially distributed to a world public through the traditional media of television and newspapers, but ‘were made available through the pervasiveness of digital cameras and networked digital media’ (p. 3). Second, like Pollock, Grusin draws on theorists whose concepts long preceded 9/11 (in his case, Benjamin, Bataille, Bergson, William James and Spinoza). In particular,

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