“My little war-porn addiction”
“My little war-porn addiction”: David Shields on how the New York Times made the Iraq and Afghanistan wars look “really cool, really glamorous, really bloodless”
"The idiosyncratic Seattle-based writer David Shields was startled as he followed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through the New York Times’ visual representation. “At least once a week I would be enchanted and infuriated by these images, and I wanted to understand why,” he writes in the introduction to his new book. So he spent months going over every front page war photo since the wars began — more than 1,00 images.
The result of his inquiry is “War is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict.” It’s a twisted kind of coffee-table book: Most of “War is Beautiful” reproduces the newspaper’s images, one per page, in between brief pieces by Shields and art critic Dave Hickey, who argues that “combat photographs today are so profoundly touched in the process of bringing them out, that they amount to corporate folk art … They are no longer ‘lifelike,’ but rather ‘picture-like.’”
Shields also sets up the images with brief quotations. For the most part, though, he lets the images speak for themselves."
http://www.salon.com/2015/11/01/my_little_war_porn_addiction_david_shields_on_how_the_new_york_times_made_the_iraq_and_afghanistan_wars_look_really_cool_really_glamorous_really_bloodless/
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