Examines the indelible images that presidents and journalists alike claim drive American foreign policy and public opinion.

Examines the indelible images that presidents and journalists alike claim drive American foreign policy and public opinion.

In 2005, photographer Chris Hondros captured a striking image of a young Iraqi girl in the aftermath of the killing of her parents by American soldiers. The shot stunned the world and has since become iconic—comparable to the infamous photo by Nick Ut of a Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack. Both images serve as microcosms for their respective conflicts. Afterimages looks at the work of war photographers like Hondros and Ut to understand how photojournalism interacts with the American worldview. Liam Kennedy here maps the evolving relations between the American way of war and photographic coverage of it. Organized in its first section around key US military actions over the last fifty years, the book then moves on to examine how photographers engaged with these conflicts on wider ethical and political grounds, and finally on to the genre of photojournalism itself. Illustrated throughout with examples of the photographs being considered, Afterimages argues that photographs are important means for critical reflection on war, violence, and human rights. It goes on to analyze the high ethical, sociopolitical, and legalistic value we place on the still image’s ability to bear witness and stimulate action.

In Cold War historiography, the 1960s are often described as a decade of mounting diplomatic tensions and international social unrest. At the same time, they were a period of global media revolution: communication satellites compressed time and space, television spread around the world, and images circulated through print media in expanding ways. Examining how U.S. policymakers exploited these changes, this book offers groundbreaking international research into the visual media battles that shaped America's Cold War from West Germany and India to Tanzania and Argentina.

The emergence of newly independent African nations onto the world stage in the mid-twentieth century precipitated a contest for influence among Cold War superpowers, leading the United States to mount an international campaign of photographic diplomacy underpinned by a faith in the medium’s capacity to cross cultural boundaries. However, the increasing global visibility of racial injustice undermined US claims that the nation had transcended colonial racism. Drawing on extensive research in the archives of the United States Information Agency (USIA) and concentrating on the period from the mid-1950s through to the late 1960s, Darren Newbury traces the role of photography in the United States’ appeal to Africa. Newbury shows how photographing the political, cultural, and educational visits of Africans to the United States provided a space for the imagination of international cooperation and friendship; how the United States presented the civil rights struggle as an example of democracy in action; and how it pictured a world of integration and racial coexistence. Cold War Photographic Diplomacy chronicles this careful scripting of images and picture stories and details the cultural and pedagogical work that photography was expected to perform as it was inserted into the visual culture of African cities through magazines, posters, pamphlets, and window displays. Locating photography at the intersection of African decolonization, racial conflict in the United States, and the cultural Cold War, this study will especially appeal to students and scholars of the history of photography, American studies, and Africana studies.

This edited collection brings together critical and up-to-date assessments of how mainstream American and British media cover their respective foreign policies, paying special attention to ‘official enemies’. In the age of the internet and social media, the reporting and commentary on world events by mainstream Western media remains tightly bound by the way in which Western governments promote their framing. This book explores the extent to which historical and recent Western media coverage has reflected and continues to reflect the foreign policies of the United States and the United Kingdom towards ten non-Western countries: Afghanistan, China, Cuba, Haiti, Iran, Palestine, Russia, Serbia, Syria, and Vietnam. Chapters analyse media coverage before, during and after war and geo-political and economic conflicts. Drawing from diverse perspectives and methods, including historical analysis, content analysis, critical discourse analysis, and critical linguistics, Journalism and Foreign Policy offers original insight into the Western media’s representation of important global events and developments, as well as the key scholarly issues of propaganda and digital media, across a wide range of recent coverage. This volume is key reading for academics and students in the areas of foreign policy and international politics, international communication, media content analysis, and journalism.

How are events turned into news pictures that define them for the audience? How do events become commodified into pictures that both capture them and reiterate the values of the agencies that sell them? This book looks at every stage of the production of news photographs as they move to and from the ground and are sold around the world. Based on extensive fieldwork at a leading international news agency that includes participant observation with photographers in the field, at the agency’s local and global picture desks in Israel, Singapore, and the UK, in-depth interviews with pictures professionals, and observations and in-depth interviews at The Guardian’s picture desk in London, the findings in this book point to a wide cultural production infrastructure hidden from – and yet also nurtured and thus very much determined by – the consumer’s eye.