War/Photography, the catalogue accompanying the exhibition by the same name at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) (click here for review), is a massive and important book. Topping out at 606 pages with hundreds of photographs gathered from archives around the world, War/Photography is now and will be for many years a crucial resource for anyone working on war and photography. According to the authors, most notably Anne Wilkes Tucker, the chief curator and engineer of the project, “the primary goal . . . has been to expand the discourse about photographs of armed conflict and its aftermath by identifying types of photographs as well as introducing other avenues by which war photography might be understood, particularly in relation to military perspectives and priorities” (7). Organized thematically to replicate the experience of being involved in conflict, War/Photography is more interested in photography’s commonalities across wars than in each war’s historical specificity.

By framing the project through thematic categories, such as “deployment” or “executions,” War/Photography makes some brilliant and profound juxtapositions, allowing the reader to wrestle with the ethical and political problems of war. In the section on children, the editors have placed on facing pages two photographs from the U.S. war in Iraq of a soldier with a child (478–79). On one side is Chris Hondros’s U.S. Troops Mistakenly Kill Iraqi Civilians, Tal Afar, Iraq, dated January 18, 2005. It features a soldier’s legs, shadowed in darkness, with a screaming Iraqi child covered in blood seeing, presumably, his family shot and killed by U.S. troops. On its own, the photograph is deeply troubling, with the faceless soldier looming over innocence in the face of the bloodied child. The caption seems to offer an apology for the U.S. war in Iraq. The facing photograph depicts a peaceful United States, the “homefront,” in Andrea Bruce’s 2006 When the War Comes Home. Here, a soldier at home, off duty from Iraq, reads to a child dressed in fatigues. Of course, both children are “at home,” but by placing these images side by side, letting them speak to each other, the editors have brilliantly used photographs to introduce the political and ethical ambiguities of war.

These critiques, however, emerge not from the essays in the book but from the reader’s own critical engagement with the placement of the photographs in War/Photography. The essays do not interrogate the use of the word “mistakenly” in Hondros’s caption, for example, when the same caption might have used the word “murdered” if it had appeared in an Iraqi newspaper. This in turn raises the book’s central problem: the U.S. vantage point of many conflicts becomes universalized to speak for all war photography.

This standpoint is evident in the book’s use of Joe Rosenthal’s Old Glory Goes Up Mt. Suribachi (1945), the Iwo Jima photograph and recent MFAH acquisition, which became the iconic war image celebrating the glory of “just” warfare. Not only do the editors open the book with this image, but they also dedicate a large section near its end to the visual culture surrounding the U.S. capture of the island. The fantastic Iwo Jima photoessay shows the variety of ways that photography circulated in scrapbooks, postage stamps, newspapers, advertisements, and other media, and it engages one of the project’s most important contributions—the role of photographers and photoeditors in defining war via images. At the same time, the Iwo Jima photograph is a perfect frame for the project’s U.S. national vision. In fact, the catalogue and its attendant essays are embedded in a U.S. context that speaks for all times and places. When Tucker writes that “flag raising” conjures up the Iwo Jima photograph, she should have added the phrase “for Americans.” A flag-raising photograph by Soviet photographer Evgenii Khaldei, modeled (and similarly staged) on Rosenthal’s, that shows the Soviet flag being raised over the Reichstag in Berlin conjures fond associations for Russian viewers of the Soviet Union’s triumph over Germany in World War II, or what the Soviets called the “Great Patriotic War.” It may be true that universal icons like Rosenthal’s are possible. But even if an icon is universally recognizable, that does not imply that only one meaning of the icon is universally shared, or that each viewer sees the same thing in the photograph. I suspect the Japanese have a very different relationship to Rosenthal’s photograph. Similarly, the book’s many powerful photographs from U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia show the American understanding of a war that tore U.S. society apart. Even in that context, photographs of the 1975 evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Saigon mean one thing to a U.S. veteran of the war, another to a draft dodger, and still another to a Vietnamese citizen, who may see the pain of her or his own country’s tragedy or the defeat of U.S. imperialism.

I was particularly struck by the editors’ incorporation of many Soviet photographs into the project. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. optics defining War/Photography create a tension with these photographs, including Dmitrii Baltermants’s 1941 Attack, which graces the cover. Although each section includes Russian or Soviet photographs of war, there is a subconscious polemic, reminiscent of the Cold War, that shapes how war and photography are presented. The editors juxtaposed 1950s photographs of U.S. nuclear weapons testing with images of the twentieth anniversary of the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl. For one, the comparison is odd, if not problematic. Nuclear weapons are not the same as nuclear power. Beyond that, the editors picture the awe of U.S. nuclear military technology in the 1950s alongside the tragedy of what nuclear accidents look like thirty years after the fact. The former is pictured in its glory with no attendant critical text; the latter, victim of its own incompetence.

The power of the many Soviet photographs included in the book is undermined as each one undergoes critical evaluation of its veracity. Max Alpert’s Combat loses much of its iconic status in the contextualizing essay, which quotes another photographer saying it was not taken when Alpert, and subsequent history, said it was (i.e., 1942). The catalogue’s editors include the often repeated story of Khaldei’s staging of the raising of the Red Flag photograph without doing the same for Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima photograph. If that essay gives the necessary historical context of the U.S. capture of the island and celebrates Rosenthal’s image as a brilliant war photograph whose power was magnified by its broad circulation and frequent replication, Khaldei’s image, which was also widely circulated and often replicated, is rendered a Soviet fabrication. Georgy Petrusov’s stunning photograph Tanks in Procession (1930s), whose dramatic motion Tucker highlights, is again undermined when she emphasizes that such a modernist image would later be attacked in an era of conservative Stalinist aesthetics during the late 1930s and 1940s. One only needs to look at Attack on the cover, crackling with motion, to know that this is an overstatement.

In the section “Executions,” Tucker’s introductory essay discusses images of postwar Czech and Soviet executions of Nazi criminals and suggests that such public executions “were rare in Western countries, having declined in recent centuries with the establishment of penitentiaries and nation-states in lieu of monarchies. Imprisonment and compulsory labor replaced public displays to demonstratively punish evil and discourage future offences, and by the nineteenth century, executions were more commonly conducted behind prison walls” (241). Aside from the very public executions of Native Americans throughout the nineteenth century on the orders of such figures as Abraham Lincoln, the contrast Tucker draws is between “civilization” and “barbarism.” (The other photographs of public executions are from Iran, Japan, and Fascist Italy.) The editors thus suggest that Americans kill in a civilized way, behind closed doors; Russians, Czechs, and the Japanese kill publicly and barbarically.

Barbaric societies not only execute civilians publicly but they take pictures of these executions. War/Photography reproduces a 1945 Life magazine photograph of the wartime beheading of an U.S. soldier with the title, Pacific War: Savage Battles Continue as Europe’s Peace Comes. The original Life caption reveals a deep Orientalism: “A Japanese war atrocity is appallingly documented by this Japanese snapshot of one officer preparing to behead an Allied pilot with his samurai sword. In the background other Japanese look on impassively. The Japanese are strangely sentimental and moral about this form of murder, finding it ‘in accordance with the compassionate mercy of Bushido.’” Here the editors of War/Photography uncomfortably echo, albeit perhaps unwittingly, their Life editorial predecessors through their lack of critical attention to the image and caption.

In the same section, the Japanese beheading of a U.S. military pilot appears just two photographs before the “execution” of civilian Soviet Jews in an Einsatzgruppen “action,” what others might call a “Holocaust photograph.” The editors have included dozens of images of mass executions on the Eastern Front during World War II, the liberation of concentration camps littered with bodies, postwar acts of retribution, trials, and the like. Each of these is included in its respective thematic section: “Executions,” “Prisoners of War,” or “Civilians” (where Baltermants’s famous photograph Grief (1942) appears). In so doing, the catalogue places the racially motivated murders in a long line of civilian atrocities, and treats the Holocaust as another “civilian massacre” (416). Of course the Holocaust is that. But it is also much more than that. Outside of footnotes and references, the word “Holocaust” only appears two times in the entire book and never in reference to a photograph.

On the one hand, by placing Holocaust photographs into broad categories, the editors attempt to make a powerful statement about the repetitiveness of atrocities across time and place. This editorial choice gestures toward what cultural theorist Michael Rothberg has called “multidirectional memory,” which moves away from the discussion about universalism or particularism when talking about the Holocaust. Rothberg argues that images of Nazi atrocities against Jews are often, and should be, used cross-culturally to generate memories about other groups’ collective traumas. This allows others to create memories through the Holocaust and simultaneously highlights the uniqueness of what happened to Jews and others during World War II. On the other hand, the same editorial choice—bringing together photographs in a unifying section without attending to their individual particularities—suggests a moral equivalency. “The dead are dead,” War/Photography suggests, whether they were student protestors killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University (in the section “Civilian Deaths”) or they were 7,000 Jews, Sinti, and Roma who died in a single Nazi mass murder campaign on the Eastern Front of World War II (also in “Civilian Deaths”).

War/Photography becomes a show about “war” with “photography” in war’s service, and does nothing to define what makes a given war unique. Photography without the story can only provide the same views of deployment or executions. Ironically, in the catalogue’s introduction, Tucker quotes Susan Sontag, who wrote one of the most challenging statements on war photography in Regarding the Pain of Others: “The problem is not that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs. This remembering through photographs eclipses other forms of understanding and remembering. . . . To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture” (6). While the editors of War/Photography provide careful context for the photographs, as the book discusses particular photographers and the process of making pictures, in the end it ignores Sontag’s warning by failing to engage fully with other forms of historical context, especially those that concern U.S. military action. As Sontag predicted, readers of War/Photography will remember the photographs, but not the stories they document.