All is War

This text is an examination of how photographs become prisoners of the discourse of war. It explores how photographs come to be subjugated by text, and are set to work promoting the normalization of warfare. But the potential of photographs to evade the suppression of their critical potential is the real target of this analysis. Its visual focus is upon two instances of photographic recontextualization in the work of two artists whose oeuvre has been nurtured in different ways by the conflicts of the twentieth century. Gerhard Richter’s photographic archive Atlas, and Christian Boltanski’s reconfiguration of the German wartime propaganda magazine Signal provide examples of small acts of discursive violence committed against what Michel Foucault characterizes as the violence of discourse. In these two works, it becomes possible to glimpse the extent to which everyday life and experience is saturated by the logic of war, and perhaps to imagine states beyond this. A number of theoretical conflicts are navigated in order to examine the differing function of images and text in the discourse of power, particularly between the epistemic analysis of Michel Foucault and the more psychoanalytically inflected thought of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Margaret Iverson. This is a reparatory reading which seeks to find, among the antinomies, a common position that provides a means of undermining hegemonic narratives of warfare.