J'ai obtenu ma thèse en histoire de la photographie de l'Institut Courtauld de Londres en 2023. Voir ci-dessous le résumé en anglais, avec sa traduction en français à venir bientôt.
Abstract : Much of the writing about the First Gulf War (1990–91) remains attached to the enduring myth of the technological avant-garde of “smart” weaponry and visual systems associated with its representation. It also assumes that there exists no significant photography of this war, both because of censorship and because television is remembered as the main medium through which it was experienced. My research questions this orthodoxy. It is true that press coverage of the war largely conformed to the agendas of the Allied states. Nevertheless, I focus on the fact that many photographers were working on the ground, and I explore the important photographs that were taken but rarely seen or remembered. I first tackle “technology” in its largest understanding: both the military and media’s infatuation with new technologies at the time, its discussion in theory (notably in postmodernism, especially in the work of Baudrillard), its iconographical presence (in Futurism and contemporary art, as well as in photojournalism), and the way it shaped how the media and photography were functioning. I nuance the memory of avant-gardist, efficient technology in the Gulf War to focus on technological continuity with the past, and on failures. Then, with the help of several case studies, including the work of the Sygma agency, Derek Hudson, Kenneth Jarecke and Exene Cervenka, Peter Turnley, Abbas, and Kaveh Kazemi, I analyse themes of Gulf War representation that have not been focused upon, among which gender and sexuality, the digital, religion, civilians, and Palestinians. I do so in a progression from images that the Western reader would be most familiar with, to publications that purported to break away from the official American narrative of the war notably by showcasing death, and finally to narratives attentive to a perspective from the Gulf region itself. This research sheds light on the materiality of photographic technology, and on the visibility of women, refugees, and victims in the First Gulf War. I argue that photography can help us review our collective memory of this conflict as a virtual, video-game war, to better account for its long-lasting human and ecological damage.
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