Pg. 99: Dora Apel's "War Culture and the Contest of Images"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: War Culture and the Contest of Images by Dora Apel.

About the book, from the publisher:

War Culture and the Contest of Images analyzes the relationships among contemporary war, documentary practices, and democratic ideals. Dora Apel examines a wide variety of images and cultural representations of war in the United States and the Middle East, including photography, performance art, video games, war reenactment, and social media images, while exploring the merging of photojournalism and artistic practices, the effects of visual framing, and the construction of both sanctioned and counter-hegemonic narratives in a global contest of images.

As a result of the global visual culture in which anyone may produce as well as consume public imagery, the wide variety of visual and documentary practices present realities that would otherwise be invisible or officially off-limits. In our digital era, the prohibition and control of images has become nearly impossible to maintain. Using carefully chosen case studies—such as Krzysztof Wodiczko's video projections and public works in response to 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the performance works of Coco Fusco and Regina Galindo, and the practices of Israeli and Palestinian artists—Apel posits that contemporary war images serve as mediating agents in social relations and as a source of protection or refuge for those robbed of formal or state-sanctioned citizenship.

While never suggesting that documentary practices are objective translations of reality, Apel shows that they are powerful polemical tools both for legitimizing war and for making its devastating effects visible. Today, more than ever, and after thirty years of academic analysis, the documentary image demonstrates renewed potential for galvanizing radical critique of the state in a time of global political upheaval. Ultimately, Apel asserts that in modern warfare and in the accompanying culture of war that capitalism produces as a permanent feature of modern society, the contest of images is as critical as the war on the ground.

Learn more about War Culture and the Contest of Images at the Rutgers University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: War Culture and the Contest of Images.

--Marshal Zeringue