Abstract

It is widely believed that photography is a ‘transparent’ medium: by seeing through a photograph we directly perceive the world itself. For this reason, photographs are thought to be an especially objective means of representation, and war photography relies on the ideal of objectivity to communicate the surreal horror of distant goings-on. But the aims and practice of war photography, I argue, are at odds with the ideal of objectivity and the resulting image’s transparency. War photography cannot be transparent, lest it be merely documentary. Instead, war photography’s primary aims are perlocutionary: it aims to convey the horrors of war and spur action to end the conflict. Its proper subject is therefore neither identical to, nor really similar to, the objects it depicts; instead, these objects represent the photograph’s subject.