This lecture will consider some of the challenges faced by contemporary photojournalism in the documentation of twenty-first-century warfare. More particularly, it will examine representations of American military power in a “postphotographic” age, an image saturated era in which the violent conduct of war has become less tangible or accountable in documentary terms. It will consider some of the ideas and arguments about the limits of photojournalism and consider several strategies and practices by photographers seeking to reinvigorate the capacity for photography to represent the realities of twenty-first-century warfare.
Liam Kennedy is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin. He is the author of Susan Sontag (1995), Race and Urban Space in American Culture (2000), and Afterimages: Photography and US Foreign Policy (2016), and editor of Urban Space and Representation (1999), The Visual Culture of Urban Regeneration (2004), The Wire (2012), and The Violence of the Image (2014). He is currently researching books on US culture and globalization and on diaspora cultures, and editing a book on neoliberalism and American literature.