Reflections on the Visual Truth and War Photography: A Historian's Perspective

In order to discuss visual truth both from the epistemological and ethical perspective, this essay focuses on the nature of photographic image and its complex relationship with human perception and ethics in Western culture. It argues that this relationship is similarly complex to that of history and reality it represents and points out that the ethical approach to truth is most constructive for society. By looking at the most politically, ethically, and ideologically engaged category: war photography, the author analyzes how images are constructed and used in various contexts. The text provides a background of history of war iconography but focuses on the examples from the twentieth and twenty-first century: the Vietnam War, the Balkan conflict, the war in the Persian Gulf, the war in Iraq, and the war in Syria.