News of two new discussions of War and Photography.  The first is an exhibition, War/Photography: images of armed conflict and its aftermath, which started out at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston last November and then moves to Los Angeles (in time for the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers), Washington DC and New York:

• The Annenberg Space for Photography | March 23–June 2, 2013

• The Corcoran Gallery of Art | June 29–September 29, 2013

• The Brooklyn Museum | November 8, 2013–February 2, 2014

The exhibition takes a critical look at the relationship between war and photography, exploring what types of photographs are, and are not, made, and by whom and for whom. Rather than a chronological survey of wartime photographs or a survey of “greatest hits,” the exhibition presents types of photographs repeatedly made during the many phases of war—regardless of the size or cause of the conflict, the photographers’ or subjects’ culture or the era in which the pictures were recorded. The images in the exhibition are organized according to the progression of war: from the acts that instigate armed conflict, to “the fight,” to victory and defeat, and images that memorialize a war, its combatants and its victims. Both iconic images and previously unknown images are on view, taken by military photographers, commercial photographers (portrait and photojournalist), amateurs and artists.

Elissa Curtis previewed the exhibition in the New Yorker last year, and included a mesmerising gallery of 28 images from the collection (whose coverage starts in 1846 with the Mexican-American war); there’s also a longer discussion (and a smaller gallery) in Carol Kino‘s New York Times review.

The accompanying book (right) War/Photography by Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michels with Natalie Zelt, is available from Yale University Press.

The second is a performance work by Boca del Lupo called Photog., which is here in Vancouver (PuSh) and Burnaby (Shadbolt) this month and next:

Drawn from the real life accounts of top conflict photographers, Boca del Lupo examines the juxtapositions and internal struggles that many photogs experience between foreign soil and home turf; between privilege and suffering; between disconnect and belonging; between war and peace.With verbatim text from interviews with award-winning war photographers and international journalists, dazzling physicality, computer animation, video, and physical theatre, the end result is a deeper connection between our own lives and the lives of those we see in the news every day.

Click on the image shown here for a gallery.  Some background to the one-man show here and here. Thanks to Jorge Amigo for the info – we’re off to see this tomorrow night.