“The Unseen Gulf War,” Disremembered Images and Method

Abstract

In an evolution from the methodology now widely accepted by historians of photojournalism—namely to focus on the photograph as printed on the magazine page, and on its dissemination—I call for the need to pay attention instead to the large swathes of unpublished images that remain marginalised in the narrative of photojournalism history. My focus in this article is on press photographs of the First Persian Gulf War (1990-91) that had escaped the public’s view at the time but were later supposedly “rediscovered.” Taking as a case study a 2003 issue of The Guardian weekend magazine G2 titled “The Unseen Gulf War,” I argue that, despite claims that the selected photographs were exclusive content, the issue actually plays mainly on familiarity, and brings to a wider audience images that had already achieved various degrees of public existence. I then draw a parallel between this media endeavour and the academic research approach, parsing through a variety of methodological obstacles and relevant theoretical considerations, ultimately to demonstrate that the way we approach the history of photojournalism has an impact on how we tell history itself.

Keywords

• First Persian Gulf War
• photojournalism
• memory
• history
• method