Michele Martin, images at War: Illustrated Periodicals and Constructed Nations

摘要

'Total wars' are often assumed to be 20th-century phenomena, that is, conflicts where distinctions between combatants and non-combatants disappear and entire nation-states become dedicated to the mass production of sufficient munitions and machineries of war to deliver victory, whatever the cost. Photo-journalism, too, is commonly defined as a 20th-century innovation, offering an unprecedented means for the mass reproduction of 'the precise and transitory instant' (to quote Henri Cartier Bresson). It has even been argued that photo-journalism played a significant part in the totalizing of military conflict, at least in a psychological sense, by creating new opportunities for intimacy with human suffering in distant conflicts. No doubt many non-Spaniards in 1936 who saw Robert Capa's photographs of the civilians in Madrid sheltering from artillery and air attack by nationalist forces had no problems projecting the scenes from the Gran Via, to Piccadilly Circus or the Champs-Elysees.