War Images Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This has been my research paper of applying for PhD in photography in the University for the Creative Arts in England, but rejected in May 2018. Based on an interdisciplinary methodology, this doctoral research aims to critically analyze... more

This has been my research paper of applying for PhD in photography in the University for the Creative Arts in England, but rejected in May 2018.

Based on an interdisciplinary methodology, this doctoral research aims to critically analyze and arguably understand the signification of propaganda in some artistic elements realized and used or abused by the artists and the Statesmen/women. Because the dissertation takes an interdisciplinary approach through library research, it relies on several disciplines and methodologies: art, journalism, political philosophy and science.
In order to limit in time and space for its academic purposes, the dissertation is relying on photography and image that the Federal Government of the United States of America and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are universally using in their propagandist agenda in the War on Terror and the establishment of a New Caliphate. In other words, it tries to know why and how these States are falsifying reality to either hide or justify their violence (particularly torture, rape, slavery, and genocide) through visual propaganda. It is also aware of the controversial concept of propaganda as art, since it would examine the debates among the artists, thinkers, and politicians regarding the use or abuse of art in public brainwashing whereby a governor is able to commit any State crime in the name of God, justice, liberty, or democracy.
Why does this research undertake to understand visual propaganda made by the US Government and the ISIS? First, both political institutions have enormous political, economic, social, scientific, and artistic power to manipulate public opinion nationally and internationally. They are both relying on ideological brainwashing, which means democracy and religion. Third, they have some artists, including image specialists, and scientists who help them in their conquest of the world. Finally, they are perfectly using carious mass communication tools, particularly the Internet or even new one in the future, to propagate some falsified information, images, and documents in war against each other.
The use of visual arts and the employment of artists by the States for a propagandist agenda are not obviously a new phenomenon. For instance, the Behistun Inscription constitutes a piece of propaganda establishing Darius’s right to rule. If visual propaganda has a long history of painting, sculpturing, and graphing as the existence of the State itself, the emergence and development of the Internet by the Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions, particularly after the September 11 attacks, has given an unlimited dimension to propaganda in its both quantitative and qualitative aspects through the mass media like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Telegram. Government photography has thus found a huge laboratory in a planetary dimension in which some photographers have embraced certain new and inestimable opportunities to mix their artistic aspiration with political and economic aspirations. This modern visual job requires that the governors and photographers work together to falsify reality in an artistic and political manner that we regard as propaganda. In this regard, all people around the world have ceaselessly become the target of propagandist images, since propaganda by photography needs no specific language, and images are easily propagating everywhere without any geographical limitation, thanks to the digital power of the State as, for example, disclosed by Snowden.
Those symbiotic relationships between governance and art, which we can call “political photography”, would cause many questions to which the dissertation tries to reply, such as what is the demarcation line between governance and art? Does the State, i.e. the US Government and the ISIS in our case, need the photographers to manipulate public opinion in its crime against existence? If the answer is positive, how does it use them? Should be any separation between photography and governance? What is the responsibility of photographers in governance in its propagandist agenda? Should the society consider any complicity of artists in State crime realized or facilitated by photographic propaganda? Does the civil society have any power to limit or to destroy visual propaganda?
There are some original aspects in this research project. Firstly, if American propaganda is well documented, especially after the Second World War, it has currently obtained new aspects after 9/11 whereby the USA has been attacked for first time in its own territory. Secondly, the ISIS is nearly a new terrorist organization with universal power of recruiting and using the jihadists of terror and massacre around the world through some sophisticated images invoking Islam. Indeed, despite its limited history, the ISIS has proved that it can use visual media very effectively for its propaganda and theatrical violence. Finally, it seems that the physical death of the US Government and the ISIS cannot unfortunately result in the disappearance of their visual propaganda, because – as, for example, Neo-Nazism has already shown – the visual elements of their propaganda help their ideologies to come into existence again or to renew in different models. In other words, their images have already made them somehow eternal. In this sense, my previous doctoral research on State crime and violence would be helpful, since my second PhD thesis focused on why and how the States struggled to keep their powers through some sophisticated violent and non-violent tools including brainwashing and propaganda made by some intellectuals.

Keywords: State, Propaganda, Visual Propaganda, Political Photography, USA, ISIS, Art, Photography, Visual Terror, Hollywood Visual Style