Reading Time: 3 minutes The French-Armenian’s latest project, Black Garden, sees a nation in a perpetual state of conflict, striving for autonomy, no matter how long it might take
In her essay, Looking at War, Susan Sontag writes: “Photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus.”
The digital age has birthed unprecedented familiarity with widespread death and destruction.
Whether eliciting calls for peace, cries for retribution or a simple and continuously refuelled awareness that terrible things happen, visual recordings of violence litter our newsfeeds daily — and for those of us who have never experienced war, the images are our only reference.
Against the backdrop of this shift in the way modern conflict interacts with media, the War & Conflict Collection highlights the artists, photojournalists and documentary photographers both shaping and challenging our understanding of unrest, past and present.