Icons of War and Terror

This book explores the ideas of key thinkers and media practitioners who have examined images and icons of war and terror.

Icons of War and Terror explores theories of iconic images of war and terror, not as received pieties but as challenging uncertainties; in doing so, it engages with both critical discourse and conventional image-making. The authors draw on these theories to re-investigate the media/global context of some of the most iconic representations of war and terror in the international ‘risk society’. Among these photojournalistic images are:

• Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of a naked girl, Kim Phuc, running burned from a napalm attack in Vietnam in June 1972;
• a quintessential ‘ethnic cleansing’ image of massacred Kosovar Albanian villagers at Racak on January 15, 1999, which finally propelled a hesitant Western alliance into the first of the ‘new humanitarian wars’;
• Luis Simco’s photograph of marine James Blake Miller, ‘the Marlboro Man’, at Fallujah, Iraq, 2004;
• the iconic toppling of the World Trade Centre towers in New York by planes on September 11, 2001; and the ‘Falling Man’ icon – one of the most controversial images of 9/11;
• the image of one of the authors of this book, as close-up victim of the 7/7 terrorist attack on London, which the media quickly labelled iconic.

This book will be of great interest to students of media and war, sociology, communications studies, cultural studies, terrorism studies and security studies in general.