Imagine stepping out your front door listening to a song that seems to immediately define the mood you are feeling. One way or another, the song seems to perfectly fit the soundtrack of your life at that exact moment.
Though you may not have realized it, that song has set the tone of your day. Without so much as a conscious thought, your song choice may have contributed to your worldview; your perception of the day ahead of you might be entirely different after popping in your headphones than it would’ve had you not listened.
This is just one moment in life when we are so influenced by all the stimuli around us, that it becomes impossible to detect whether or not our opinions and perceptions are genuinely authentic.
David Shields, author of 18 previous books, one of them a New York Times best-seller, takes this concept and expands its proportions to a much larger scale in his new book, “War Is Beautiful.” The book challenges The New York Times’ judgment regarding front page photo choices when publicizing in times of war.
Rather than highlighting atrocities and possible negatives ensued by the position of Americans abroad during war, Shields’ book gives light to the bias of the United States as portrayed throughout The New York Times photography. Compiling a range of photography used in The New York Times since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the book presents a range of ways photography was used within The Times to produce propagandist messages in support of our country’s government.
While still allowing viewers to make their own objective decisions, Shields does a great job creating easy to understand chapters that highlight different messages broadcasted by specific photos. The chapters are accompanied by carefully chosen quotes representing the thought processes behind The Times’ decisions to put these photos in print; simultaneously, each chapter shows a specific way in which The Times have chosen to explicate war.
The chapters take many stances and viewpoints. They give light to photos that emanate an amusing aesthetic, they touch on the glorification of war as being protective and religious, and they ultimately show the tug these photos make on our heart strings.
Viewing this sublime imagery paired with the quotes Shields chooses is unparalleled in its effect. It is difficult to detect the propagandist messages possessed by each photo when they are being published one by one on the cover of The Times. But as a pack the photo and quote combinations become disturbingly real, and you too feel like part of the problem for having indulged in these photos.
Just like popping your headphones in at the beginning of your day, reading the morning paper with blinders on may change your outlook on not only the day, but on an entire war itself. Planting your eyes on yet another war photo on the front cover of The Times has a manipulative quality, and this is something Shields astutely pointed out.
While each photo’s aesthetic is independently fantastical in itself, viewing the photos together as one collection feels like the crashing of waves on your heart, but this was the exact message Shields was trying to get across. Painful, beautiful, numbing, horrifying, and wonderful all in one, these photos provide insight into a world that Times readers everywhere think they know something about, but truly have no idea.
The verdict: If you consider yourself an open-minded person, you’d be at a loss if you don’t read this book.
Reach writer Rebecca Gross at arts@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @becsgross
