Bloomsbury War Faces on Screen: Photography, Film and the Politics of Representation

How have images of the face been used to document and distort the phenomenon of war? Such is the question that drives this book, with the face forming a recurring - almost ubiquitous - motif throughout visual depictions of military conflict. At once interdisciplinary, transnational, and transhistorical, War Faces on Screen is organised into three sections. Section One examines representations of the face in war photography, illustrating how photographers have visualised the invisible violence of psychic trauma. Ethical and political concerns are at the forefront of each essay, from the advocacy work of portraiture, to AI tools capable of generating a range of aesthetically convincing yet potentially discriminatory images. Section Two focuses on the aesthetics of the cinematic close-up, drone vision, and how the selective digital colourisation of bodies and faces from archival footage works to impose a moral hierarchy. Section Three concludes the book with a focus on colonisation, decolonisation and defacement, extending earlier discussions of the imperial violence found in recent Hollywood films, where empathy is displaced from the ethnic other to the suffering Western soldier. Our final chapters chart how the face is central to articulating the meaning and sentiment of colonial and civil wars, with even seemingly progressive documentaries perpetuating unequal power dynamics and problematic notions of victimhood. Foregrounding the work of artists and practitioners, alongside theoretical frameworks, War Faces on Screen ultimately forms a radically innovative contribution to the study of image-making and war-making.