War Is Beautiful

For many individuals, reading the news is a vital part of the day.
Whether as a morning routine or an

evening relaxation, we look towards the news to stay informed about the world around us. For
Americans, the reference remains the New York Times: a newspaper which in its 164 years of
existence has won 117 Pulitzer prizes (well more than any other news outlet). Its reputation is
beyond reproach for many of its loyal readers—which once included the celebrated American
author David Shields.
But recently, Shields began to grow uneasy with his fascination for the front-page photographs of
the beloved paper. Over 30 years of loyal reading, Shields recounted how the headline pictures have
left him feeling, alternately, stunned, enraptured and sickened. This range worried Shields, “I
questioned, why are these photographs gorgeous? Is it an orange sunset that I’m looking at or is it
twelve bodies that have just been decapitated?”
His latest book, War is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed
Conflict, attempts to make sense of his ambiguous sentiments in the face of the combined violence
and beauty that many of these images conveyed. This book challenges the indisputable authority of
the paper by claiming The Times has sanctified, eroticized and glamorized warfare. In Shields’
words,
“These photos are photojournalistic but in my view, they are military recruiting
posters that have no business on the front page of the most influential English-
speaking newspaper of the world. […] These pictures lead America toward war.
The phrase that kept coming to mind is one of the Department of Homeland
Security: ‘If you see something say something.’ That’s what I did but from a
different direction. I saw this and felt compelled as a writer to say something.”
Reluctant, at first, to denounce the nation’s most respected news organization, the author decided to
be methodical with his approach. With the help of his research team, Shields looked at the front-
page of every single New York Times newspaper published between 1991 to mid-2014. Of the
thousands of images he saw, Shields noticed that the front-page pictures fell into repetitive
thematics. Shields presents his argument in War is Beautiful by focusing on sixty-four photographs
neatly arranged into ten thematic categories. Some of these include death, pietà and beauty.
In his introduction, Shields offers a second-degree analysis for each theme and imagines what the
New York Times’ aesthetic goals are. These are short, yet quite lyrical, in their analysis, touching
upon Romanticism as much as hard-boiled analysis.
For instance, the chapter “God,” features images captured by John Moore and Staff Sgt. Lorie
Jewell. Shields draws a comparison between God and the U.S. Army, explaining that “the military
commands the globe. The Times surveys and imagines the battlefield from a vantage point high
above the field of play; everything is under the control for the creation of a new world.”
Shields also constructs archetypes around individuals: Men are mostly represented as heroic and
consecrated to sacrifice because “a male soldier’s combat death is as close as he’s ever going to get
to birth.” Meanwhile, women are depicted as occupied or displaced; children as faux-father figures
who are there to serve as substitutes for their recently deceased forebears.
War is Beautiful also pushes us to question whether photojournalists themselves should be equally
implicated in the promotion of warfare. In an interview published in Shields’ book, the war
photojournalist John F. Burns explains that his most exhilarating assignments have been on war:
“they pose the essential questions—questions of life in its darkest form. But essential also because
the subjects bore so heavily on the interest of the United States and of my newspaper, an American
newspaper.”
Obviously, war photojournalists are courageous and brave for documenting war-time realities—
however there seems to be something inherently perverse in their continual quest to photograph
these situations. Soldiers and war photojournalist are both driven by a similar enthusiasm during
warfare. Both are armed: one with a gun, the other with a camera. They are both on a quest “to
shoot” and as Susan Sontag suggests in her essay On Photography:
“there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph
people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by
having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects
that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun,
to photograph someone is a sublimated murder.”
So is the act of photographing inherently violent in itself? Shields doesn’t answer that question, but
he is open to addressing the problematics from many angles. Even his own role comes into doubt.
At points in the book, Shields reflects on the subjective lens he brings to his own writing—and the
challenges caused by his interpretations. “I chose the New York Times as a case study of how we’re
all lead as lambs to slaughter. But to some degree, I hold myself responsible—after all, I do find
these pictures stunningly beautiful. I blame myself for not pulling off the covers from my eyes
sooner: it took me too long to read against these pictures. I really love the war porn…”
Given the complexity and ambiguity of his conclusions, what does Shields hope to get out of this
book, in the end? Will it stop war? Can it put the Times out of business? No, no—but his goals are
still lofty and important to note:
“Next time, people can cast a more skeptical eye; that would be the idealistic hope. Finley Peter
Dunne, an American journalist from the 19th century said, ‘the role of a journalist is to comfort the
afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’ That’s how the New York Times has failed in their duty—and
this book is an attempt to do exactly that.”
—Athina Lugez

War Is Beautiful

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For many individuals, reading the news is a vital part of the day.

Whether as a morning routine or an

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