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Julian Stallabrass is a writer, photographer, curator and lecturer.
He is Professor of art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art,
and is the author of Art Incorporated, Oxford University Press 2006
(updated edition forthcoming), Internet Art: The Online Clash
Between Culture and Commerce, Tate Publishing, London 2003; Paris
Pictured, Royal Academy of Arts, London 2002; High Art Lite:
British Art in the 1990s, Verso, London 1999 and Gargantua:
Manufactured Mass Culture, Verso, London 1996. On a senior
fellowship from the Paul Mellon Foundation, he is currently
researching a book about the relations between cultural and
political populism.
He is the co-editor of Ground Control: Technology and Utopia, Black
Dog Publishing, London 1997, Occupational Hazard: Critical Writing
on Recent British Art, Black Dog Publishing, London 1998, and Locus
Solus: Technology, Identity and Site in Contemporary Art, Black Dog
Publishing, London 1999, and Red Art: New Utopias in Data
Capitalism, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 2014. He has written art
criticism regularly for publications including the London Review of
Books, Art Monthly and the New Statesman.
Killing for Show has its origins in Stallabrass’ curation of the
Brighton Photo Biennial in 2008, Memory of Fire: Images of War and
the War of Images’, and has been over ten years in the making. He
has published extensively in the area over this time, in forms
ranging from reviews to catalogue essays, and has edited two books
(both 2013) that bear on the subject: Documentary for the MIT/
Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art; and Memory of Fire,
published by Photoworks, Brighton. He has also been teaching these
subjects at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including the
supervision of PhDs.
A huge achievement, equal to the subject. This illuminating book
recognises the full diversity of photographic material to emerge
from the conflicts and provides a more balanced account than any
previously available. As a guide to these terrible events,
Stallabrass is consistently attentive, judicious, and humane. There
are memorable discussions of everything from the formal qualities
of North Vietnamese photography to the politics and aesthetics of
amateur photography in Iraq. --Malcolm Bull, Professor of Art and
the History of Ideas, the Ruskin School, University of Oxford
In the main Stallabrass does what he sets out to do: to show how
images are woven into the very fabric of war and the institutions
that support it[.]-- "Source Magazine"
In this incisive and insightful examination of the role of visual
culture in the depiction of war and violence in the late twentieth
and early twenty-first century, Stallabrass delivers a devastating
critique of the various ways in which photography is implicated,
consciously or not, in the neo-imperial machinations of America and
its allies. He draws out the crucial similarities and connections
but also the significant differences in how American
administrations attempted to manipulate and control the media in
the conflicts in Vietnam and South East Asia and those in Iraq and
the Middle East as 'force multipliers' to enhance their combat
capabilities into the wider geopolitical arena and to try to garner
support domestically. But he also explores how dissenting voices of
independent photographers, artists and citizen journalists have
found cracks in the armour of the monolith of state power, and the
vital role that these alternative viewpoints play in defending the
core values of civic society. --Paul Lowe, Reader in Documentary
Photography, London College of Communication
Julian Stallabrass's lucid and quietly angry publication...traces
complex forms of power and counter-power across the two major US
wars of the past half-century.... This book builds on years of work
to offer a complex and nuanced historical understanding of its
subjects.-- "Art Monthly"
Julian Stallabrass's Killing for Show is an exacting, meticulous
encyclopedia of war photography. Spanning the decades of the
Vietnam War and the so-called War on Terror, the book is a
gruesomely detailed analysis of war photography's double act: both
as art and testimony, subject to aesthetic as well as--at least
potentially--ethical evaluation. The range of examples covered is
breathtaking. It includes the most varied types of photography,
from Magnum-type shots to propaganda items, memes and amateur
pictures, from leaked footage to pr releases, from embedded
collaborator to partisan perspective. It catalogues its
developments as a series of relentless horrors hoping for moments
of redemption--which remain few and far between.-- "New Left
Review"
Killing for Show is an urgent contribution to photographic and war
history. Drawing together the barbarous histories of America's wars
in Vietnam and Iraq through an unflinching analysis of the
photographic images they produced (and those they didn't),
Stallabrass manages the exceptional feat of writing reasonably and
perceptively about a catalogue of mindless cruelty. His incisive
readings of a vast, and largely neglected, archive of photographs
underpins a persuasive and chilling account of how images of war
are used to wage war. Arguing that to resist the ever-expanding
reach of our militarism of the image requires a detailed
understanding of how killing and showing (and not-showing)
interact, Stallabrass provides an agile and uncompromising model of
activist looking. --Mignon Nixon, Professor of History of Modern
and Contemporary Art, University College, London
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