War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict*

by David Shields, Dave Hickey (Introduction)

* (in which the author explains why he no longer reads The New York Times)

Bestselling author David Shields analyzed over a decade's worth of front-page war photographs from TheNew York Times and came to a shocking the photo-editing process of the "paper of record," by way of pretty, heroic, and lavishly aesthetic image selection, pullsthe woolover the eyes of its readers; Shields forces us to face not only the the media's complicity in dubious and catastrophic military campaigns but our own as well. This powerful media mouthpiece, the mighty Times, far from being a check on governmental power, is in reality a massive amplifier for its dark forces by virtue of the way it aestheticizes warfare. Anyone baffled by the willful American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan can't help but see in this book how eagerly and invariably the Times led the way in making the case for these wars through the manipulation of its visuals. Shields forces the reader to weigh the consequences of our own passivity in the face of these images' opiatic numbing. The photographs gathered in War Is Beautiful, often beautiful and always artful, are filters of reality rather than the documentary journalism they purport to be.

Genres: Photography, War, Art, Nonfiction

112 pages, Hardcover

First published September 8, 2015

About the author

David Shields is the author of fourteen books, including Reality Hunger (Knopf, 2010), which was named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications. GQ called it "the most provocative, brain-rewiring book of 2010"; the New York Times called it "a mind-bending manifesto." His previous book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), was a New York Times bestseller. His other books include Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Believer, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Utne Reader; he's written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.

Reviews

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

"When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience." - Edmund Burke



I liked the organization, the photos (of course), the premise, and even the design of this book. I bought this a couple months ago largely out of spite/support when I found out that the New York Times was suing the editor/author because he used actual thumbnail reproductions of actual New York Times front pages as a design element in the front pages of his book. Really? Has no one their taken even a basic PR course.*

Anyway, I appreciated how David Shields completely separated the text from the photos. While this is obviously NOT how they appeared on the front page of the glamorous, sue-happy "Paper of Record", these are photographs that need to be viewed in isolation. It would probably be best done in a museum, with each photograph owning its own space, but short of that ideal, the design here worked well.

The book is divided into ten sections, or themes: Nature, Playground, Father, God, Pietà, Painting, Movie, Beauty, Love, Death. Each section centers on, obviously, war photographs that appeared on the front page of the New York Times that fit into those broad visual tropes/gestures. Obviously, there are other types of war photos (torture, etc) that either didn't often find themselves on the front page of the New York Times or were less grand, less "artistic", and less applicable to this book's basic premise that by portraying the war with big themes (God, Nature, etc) on the front piece, the New York Times was promoting not just the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but war itself.



I was also fascinated by this subject because almost every one of my direct (and several of my wife's direct) male relatives and many, many of my male and female friends spent considerable time in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Turkey, etc., during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (photo above is my little brother in Afghanistan). I was fascinated by these soldier's (they were all mostly soldiers) desire to capture on film not just their personal experience BUT the beauty of that experience. It is an interesting aspect of our need for aesthetics -- even among despair, death, destruction and ruin. We crave a harmony among the chaos and a warmth, that beauty brings, among the coldness of war.

Anyway, it is an interesting experience flipping through these photos while contemplating the horror AND the beauty of war and trying to reconcile what it means that we as a people need to constantly feed on both.

* I mean think about it for a minute corporate attorneys for the Gray Lady. Think hard. Think rationally. Yes, perhaps, David Shields might have exposed something negative associated with your paper, but it isn't like JUDITH "FUCKING" MILLER negative, or JASON "FUCKING" BLAIR negative. It is like saying, hey, there might be some negative things that happen when you make something inherently ugly look pretty day after day. It doesn't make you look great, but hell, print is dying and if this small feather gets added to what you are already carrying, NFBD. But sue? Now, all of a sudden, a small book from a small publisher in Brooklyn gets featured in blogs and NPR and shit. All of a sudden some dude in Arizona who would probably never hear about your damn problem with this David Shields using thumbnail photos of your front page gets pissed by your presumption and the fact that you are basically just suing because you can and you're kinda assholes at heart, so he decides to buy the book to: 1) support David Shields, 2) curiosity, 3) support this small Brooklyn publisher, and 4) basically tell the New York Times they are assholes in a passive way.

So, who wins really? David Shields and the small publisher in Brooklyn I imagine. I mean the law suit is probably frivolous, but he sells more books. I mean damn, don't you know how marketing works? Maybe if you spent more time figuring out how to market your damn paper in an age where most people get their news from Twitter, and LESS time badgering some guy who is making an 80% solid point about pictures and the press (which really only tangentially has anything to do you with the wrinkled Gray Lady), you could have kept me on as a paying subscriber and hell, I might have even conned my company into subscribing to your paper for me. Seriously, it just opens a whole can of beautiful worms regarding the priorities of your paper's management.

[Kate Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A modern day "Dulce et decorum est," in photographs, with the added layer of revealing the propaganda ties. I wish Shields had laid out his argument more thoroughly (give us side-by-sides between these photos and the Rockwell/movies/glamor shots they mimic; spell out the way that each photo, particularly, contributes to a theme as a whole and the practical implications of what that means on the battlefield when a complacent country absorbs these images), though I also value that Shields trusts his audience enough to simply define a theme and then give us the curated evidence.

Never before have I realized how deeply war and masculinism are tied. Shields' work has highlighted, for me, that both war and photojournalism are feminist issues.

[Hank Stuever · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thoughtful and intelligently and nearly persuasive, except that I was lost at the end: What, in Shields's (and contributors) estimation should news photography from wars look like? Or should it not exist at all? Deciding to never again look at the New York Times is not the answer, not for me. (I'm a newspaper journalist.)

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

This seems to be aimed as a provocation on an important issue but is bereft of a proper argument or thesis. There are some interesting photos though.

[David Jin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short on text and to the point, David Shield's photoessay critiquing the media's simplistic glamorization of warfare is pretty apt and easy to follow. However, it does seem incomplete. While I agree with his assertion of the paper's at-times jingoistic portrayal, he never offers up any suggestion as to how it should, or can be done.

[Wendelle]

A critical look at how war is sanctified or ennobled through the glamorization of war photography. At least, that was the stated intent of this photobook.

[Charlie Sherpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Shields' "War is Beautiful" is an evocative, coffee-table-worthy critique of an art form that seems increasingly irrelevant to how popular impressions and opinions are generated today. In an Age of "We Can Haz" Cat Memes and Pick-Your-Spin TV news, does the front page, above-the-fold photographic paper-space of The New York Times still represent anything like the key terrain for the hearts and minds of John and Joan Q. Public?

Probably not. But to over-focus on the deflating state of old media, in this case, would be to miss a larger tableau. In journalism schools and practice, at least in the reviewer's admittedly 20 century experience, the oft-stated goal is to teach people "not what to think, but how to think." Framing his explorations in an extremely tight shot—here, the example of one still-influential newspaper's hardcopy coverage—Shields is out to teach people how to think about journalism, and how images of war are developed and fixed, even in our digital age.

The 112-page, landscape-format book is largely composed of photographs treated as fine art—crisp-white pages heavy with saturated inks, interrupted by occasional set of quotations to cleanse the palette. The hardcover's book jacket is cleverly constructed as a newspaper page, with blurb-quotes and actual analytical content. (No fake filler text here!)

In the book's introduction, Shields says he started from a suspicion that "the governing ethos [of The New York Times aesthetic] was unmistakably one that glamorized war and the sacrifices made in the service to war." In the resulting intellectual exercise, Shields considered the front pages of New York Times published since 2001, curating the war-themed photography (the Gray Lady went color in 1997) into a taxonomy of 10 extremely useful visual tropes, or themes:

- Nature
- Playground
- Father
- God
- Pietá (war scenes of death that echo themes of Christ's death on the cross)
- Painting (war scenes rendered so abstractly and beautifully as to become unreal)
- Movie (technology- and action-centric scenes depicted with cinematic sensibilities, and video game verve)
- Beauty (portraits of women and children amidst scenes of war and male sacrifice)
- Love
- Death

Armed with knowledge of these themes, any reader of "War is Beautiful" will walk away with a new tool in their media-analysis kits. Shields' system of classification is, after all, potentially applicable to other mediated sources of war images. That includes those generated by governmental and military public affairs, as well as civilian media embedded with governmental agencies. In the latter, independent journalists are still dependent on their U.S. agency hosts for access, security, transportation, and food, potentially skewing views and access to events, places, and sources. [...]

[For full review, visit: http://www.redbullrising.com/2016/01/...]

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunning and disturbing photos. The author's critique of the New York Times' ongoing aestheticization of war through photography is thought-provoking, but in the end its the photos that occupy centerstage.

[Brian Page · Rating 2 out of 5]

To get the full effect of War is Beautiful: The New York Times Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict, I suggest first flipping through the pages as a fine art book, which, obvious by its layout, is clearly the intention with most pages presenting only a single image, no caption no credit no text at all, centered on its white glossy paper. Then go back through the book more slowly & carefully, reading the short quotations separating the sections, and most critically the captions which are sequestered at the back of the book. It’s the captions which make this book poignant and the contrast, even conflict, between the war-as-art layout and the banal reportage of the captions is the whole point. In his introduction, David Shields chronicles the position of the NYT in our national power infrastructure and concludes, “The program of the photos is the same as that of the Iliad: the preservation of power.” (p. 9)

All-in-all, I’m not entirely convinced. I agree that conflict photographers tend to produce images that are aesthetic, but I believe this is essentially an inherent trait of visually sophisticated photographers. Image professionals can’t help but instinctively apply attributes of good composition, exposure, and emotional peak to the photographs they create. It doesn’t take a conspiracy of the NYT reinforcing a national agenda of power & conquest for this to happen. In the afterword, David Hickey catalogs the compositional similarities between this collection of photographs and various paintings by great masters. From this, Hickey concludes, “All of this is a way of saying that these photographs are very fancy Connecticut-living-room trash, and, just to remind you, combat photography up through Viet Nam used to be good.” (p. 99) That packs a lot of confusion into one sentence. Conflict photography has always been about aesthetics. Roger Fenton’s photos from the Crimean War are practically classical tableau arrangements (and speaking of arrangements, Fenton rearranged canon balls to make an image more striking). Look also to the Spanish Civil War photographs by Taro, Capa, and Chim. Their images were aesthetic, and those photographers definitely had an agenda. And as for World War II, think of the self-censorship which most photographers simply internalized.

Ultimately, I’m ambivalent. Photojournalists of all stripes, not just conflict photographers, need to heed the basic message of War is Beautiful to not allow aesthetic consideration to itself become a stereotypical convention. That criticism has been leveled at the work of Sebastião Salgado with some justification, for example. In photojournalism it’s all about information content and communication. Good photographs communicate necessary information and without aesthetic crafting, they would not communicate as well.

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you just sit down to make your way through this book it'll take less than 30 minutes. But this is a story told in pictures, all taken from the covers of the New York Times in the last two decades in coverage on the War on Terror.

As you study the images you are drawn more and more into the thesis of the book - that the media (specifically the NYT of course, but I think the author is making a broader point) can make war palletable by showing it in wonderful, vivid photography. Not every photo in this book is easy to look at, but each tells an incredible story.

As I said - 30 minutes to read this book. But studing the images and themes will take much, much longer than this - I think for me it was about 3 hours over 10 days.

If you like a story that gets to its point and provides you with what you need to know then this book is not for you. If you like to access new perspective through deep contemplation of photographs then well, it is.

[Bill · Rating 2 out of 5]

More style than substance.

It seemed like an interesting premise but when I reached the end I wondered where the rest of it was. It's very minimalist, just about 50 photos and some quotes to lead off each section. I can only imagine the starkness of the photos is supposed to speak for themselves but I don't remember any of them sticking with me since I read this months ago. Or maybe the author would say I've just been habituated to all this war photography and so it's lost all connection to reality.

(The essay that wraps around the cover was the most interesting part)

[Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unusual, original, and a little strange but certainly makes one thinks. Mostly photographs and not much text. Visually poetic.

[Not Mike]

"Combat is the poor man's playground."
John Hoagland