Picturing America’s ‘War on Terrorism’ in Afghanistan and Iraq

Following research on depictions of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, this article discusses the nature of US news-magazine photo coverage of the ‘War on Terrorism’ in Afghanistan and the military invasion of Iraq. The analysis suggests that news-magazine photographs primarily serve established narrative themes within official discourse: that published photographs most often offer prompts for prevailing government versions of events and rarely contribute independent, new or unique visual information. Despite claims of ‘live’ and spontaneous coverage, photographs from Afghanistan and Iraq, like those from the Gulf War in 1991, are characterized by a narrow range of predictable, recurrent motifs. Repetitive images of the mustering and deployment of the American military arsenal overshadow any fuller or more complex range of depiction. And when dominant news narratives, such as the fall of the Taliban or the fall of Baghdad, come to a close, photographic coverage of continuing events in Afghanistan and Iraq falls off sharply.