Ebook: Image operations: visual media and political conflict

Still and moving images are crucial factors in contemporary political conflicts. They not only have representational, expressive or illustrative functions, but also augment and create significant events. Beyond altering states of mind, they affect bodies and often life or death is at stake. Various forms of image operations are currently performed in the contexts of war, insurgency and activism. Photographs, videos, interactive simulations and other kinds of images steer drones to their targets, train soldiers, terrorise the public, celebrate protest icons, uncover injustices, or call for help. They are often parts of complex agential networks and move across different media and cultural environments. This book is a pioneering interdisciplinary study of the role and function of images in political life. Balancing theoretical reflections with in-depth case studies, it brings together renowned scholars and activists from different fields to offer a multifaceted critical perspective on a crucial aspect of contemporary visual culture -- Back cover.;Images of the world, images of conflect / Ben O'Loughlin -- Worldmaking frame by frame / Zeynep Devrim Gursel -- Working images: Harun Farocki and the operational image / Volker Pantenburg -- Affective image operations / Jens Eder -- Method, madness and montage: assemblages of images and the production of knowledge / W.J.T. Mitchell -- Image operations: refracting control from virtual reality to the digital battlefield / Timothy Lenoir and Luke Caldwell -- Sensorship: the seen of drone warfare / Tom Holert -- Images that last? Iraq videos from YouTube to WikiLeaks / Christian Christensen -- Images of terror / Charlotte Klonk -- The making and gendering of a martyr: images of female suicide bombers in the Middle East / Verena Straub -- Photographic archives and archival entities / Ariella Azoulay -- Exposing the invisible: visual investigation and conflict / Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski -- Human rights in an age of distant witnesses: remixed lives, reincarnated images and live-streamed co-presence / Sam Gregory -- The hunger striker: a case for embodied visuality / Bishnupriya Ghosh -- The visual commons: counter-power in photography from slavery to Occupy Wall Street / Nicholas Mirzoeff.