How can one imagine that something else other then battles could represent war? The photographic and video work reunited in this book deliberately leave one to confront, the body, the fall, the wound, the death, out of the framework. Everything having been produced since 2006, they all have a common documentary ambition declared, manifested: the bias of a complete disembodiement of war and, from this, a focus on the sites, the positions and the geological or constructed spaces.
These topographic attempts give the upper hand to a reading of war by its geography in some ways, without denouncing the human cost of combats. The iconographic options coincide in a strategic domain, with an increased usage of simulation techniques, the propagation of very long distance weapons, but also with media censorship put into action by those on the ground, and the seemingly impossible task of photographers and videographers to work freely in the field. Is the warfield about to become an abstract concept, and an ideological construction, an unrepresentable notion?
Jean-Yves Jouannais
