--- title: This Means War description: A powerful show looks at how conflict is pictured canonical: https://time.com/archive/6642797/this-means-war/ author: Richard Lacayo article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2012-11-26T05:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-26T16:28:16.498Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: This Means War og:description: A powerful show looks at how conflict is pictured og:url: https://time.com/archive/6642797/this-means-war/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: This Means War twitter:description: A powerful show looks at how conflict is pictured twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # This Means War > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Richard Lacayo](https://time.com/author/richard-lacayo/) Nov 26, 2012 5:00 AM UTC by [Richard Lacayo](https://time.com/author/richard-lacayo/) Nov 26, 2012 5:00 AM UTC A few years ago, David Leeson, a photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for his coverage of the Iraq war, told an interviewer that he once truly believed there could be “a series of photographs, or a single photograph, that could end war … But can you find it? I never did.” I came across Leeson’s words in the catalog for “War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath,” the huge, tough-minded, very moving new show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. (It runs there through Feb. 3, then moves to Los Angeles, Washington and Brooklyn.) The exhibition lays out the ways cameras have been put to use during 165 years of world wars, undeclared hostilities and barely organized fang baring. Cameras are the transformer tools of warfare, adaptable as battlefield aids for reconnaissance and surveillance, as peerless instruments of propaganda and, above all, as a means to witness the atrocious facts of war. I came away from the show thinking that maybe Leeson had been holding himself to too high a standard. You may not be able to end war with a camera, but you can do a lot of useful things with one–even tell the truth. Instead of being organized chronologically, the Houston show suggests that war is better considered as an eternally recurring narrative. Curated by Anne Wilkes Tucker, with Will Michels and Natalie Zelt, “War/Photography” divides its story into chapters, from prewar buildup through postwar remembrances, with wars from all periods combined in each. The weaponry evolves from sabers to torpedoes to rocket-propelled grenades. (For the record, sharpened steel is forever.) The photo equipment changes from 19th century box cameras to cell phones and satellites. But the fundamentals of war–brutality and suffering, grief and self-sacrifice–don’t change much. They haven’t since the first time a caveman figured out how to use a rock. The show casts a wide net, with images by more than 280 photographers of all kinds–not just photojournalists but also soldiers, civilians and official military photographers like the American officer who took the movie-worthy view of war at sea USCG Cutter Spencer Destroys Nazi Sub. It also defines war photography as an activity beyond the war zone itself. That allows in postwar images like Darien, Wisconsin, Peter van Agtmael’s unnerving picture of an Iraq-war veteran with a prosthetic leg having a lightsaber battle with his sons, or Jonathan Torgovnik’s Valentine with Her Daughters Amelie and Inez, Rwanda, a haunting 2006 portrait of a woman raped by Hutu fighters, who is shown with her two daughters. One of them–the one she’s embracing–is the product of that rape. Moving outside the battlefield also acknowledges that combat is just a small part of war, which is “99% boredom and 1% sheer terror,” as one Civil War soldier put it. Pictures like Dmitri Baltermants’ 1941 image of leaping soldiers, Attack–Eastern Front, World War II, may be what we think of first as war imagery. But scenes of the home front–portraits of homecoming like Micha Bar-Am’s 1976 shot The Return from Entebbe, Ben Gurion Airport, Israel and pictures of GIs goofing around on base, killing nothing more menacing than time–they’re the face of wartime too. The decision to mingle images from many eras makes war seem like what it is: a chronic condition, a perennial dysfunction in the family of man. All the same, a bit of chronology is useful for grasping how pictures became so important to our understanding of conflict. As early as 1846, when photography was not even a decade old, a handful of photographers were already sniffing around the edges of the Mexican-American War. But the pictures they made were ghostly daguerreotypes, fragile and one of a kind. It was only during the Civil War that photographers arrived in force, toting cameras with glass-plate negatives that could produce multiple prints. Because their heavy wooden cameras required long exposure times, they couldn’t capture movement. But the dead don’t move, so scenes of battlefields littered with corpses were possible. These pictures were new, shocking and grimly fascinating. So were images of Southern towns reduced to rubble: postcards from Armageddon. And though the invention of the halftone process for printing photos in newspapers was still some years away, the Civil War pictures were circulated in multiple-edition albums and used as the basis for engravings in the widely seen illustrated press. With this combination of new hardware, new means of distribution and a dry-eyed willingness to point the lens anywhere, war photography had truly arrived. So had the moral ambiguities it still carries. No sooner had the U.S.S. Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana harbor than William Randolph Hearst, king of the jingoistic press lords, rushed in a photographer to get shots of the wreckage, in hopes it would help instigate a war with Spain. Mission accomplished. By World War I, the demand for dramatic battlefield action shots, something never easy to get, had led to the problem of elaborately doctored scenes, so much so that at least one Australian photographer was transferred away from the front. The real problem for war photography today, however, isn’t staged imagery but image overload. The tidal wave of pictures all around us, with every cell phone adding to the deluge every day, threatens to make even atrocity photos into just more pictures, as morally weightless as the movie stills they so often resemble. For all that, the scores of unforgettable pictures in “War/Photography” make clear that even in a world that contains too many pictures, photos like Walter Astrada’s Congolese Women Fleeing to Goma–of a wary mother and a nasty-looking tank headed in opposite directions–still have the power to stir your emotions. They may not be able to compel any particular judgment about the wars they represent, but they can lead you to the recognition that attention must be paid. After that, if photos by themselves can’t stop war–and they can’t–then the fault is not in our pictures but in ourselves. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6642797/this-means-war/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6642797/this-means-war/"},"headline":"This Means War","datePublished":"2012-11-26T05:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-26T16:28:16.498Z","description":"A powerful show looks at how conflict is pictured","url":"https://time.com/archive/6642797/this-means-war/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Richard Lacayo","url":"https://time.com/author/richard-lacayo/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/6642797/this-means-war/","name":"This Means War"}}]}] ```