War is horrible and we all can agree on that, yet we find ourselves in conflict after conflict after conflict in an never-ending trail of horror since the end of the second world war. Although it may now have caught up with us, and the attempt of the west to keep it off its on soil may have ended with the attacks in 2001 and now with the the attacks in Paris, the rest of the world has seen an endless parade of blood and gore. Yet the peace-movement has found its end with the demise of the Soviet Union – since then, our perception of war has changed. That already started in the early eighties: War photographers like Don McCullin, were put out of business, when governments that went into war tightened their grip on the media and newspapers were more and more tuned to be a good environment for advertising

David Shields has analyzed the war pictures of the New York Times and comes to surprising and shocking conclusions: The way that newspapers report on wars has changed dramatically:

“In my analysis very few, if any, front page A1 pictures since October of 1997 have conveyed anything of the horror, the cost, the consequence of war. To me as many as 700 of those photographs I analysed can be read as beautified and sanctified, glamourised and glorified war.”

You can read the whole interview with him on L’Oeil de la Photographie. And if you ever dare to look into Christoph Bangert’s “War Porn”, you get an idea which pictures are left out of our tabloids: When Francois Hollande now openly speaks about “War”, it becomes obvious, that the propaganda war that brought us here had already started years ago.