War Photography: The Pleasure of Ruins

Simon Norfolk, award-winning freelance photographer whose work has featured in many leading publications and galleries around the world. This talk considers the history of war photography from the perspective of a practitioner, placing it within a broader context of military optics and aesthetic traditions of viewing architectural ruins. Simon will discuss his influences in early war photography and the history of classical landscape art, considering themes of memory and beauty with regard to the fraught topics of conflict and atrocity.

Suggested reading

• Jay Winter, ‘Homecomings’, in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Canto, 1995), pp. 15-28.
• Paul Fussel ‘Arcadian Recourses’, in The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 231-269.
• Christopher Woodward, ‘Who Killed Daisy Miller?’, in In Ruins (Vintage, 2002), pp. 1-31.
• Susan Sontag, ‘Looking at War’, The New Yorker 9 December 2002. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/09/looking-at-war