How have images of the face been used to document and distort the phenomenon of war? Such is the question that drives this book, with the face forming a recurring - almost ubiquitous - motif throughout visual depictions of military conflict.
At once interdisciplinary, transnational, and transhistorical, War Faces on Screen is organised into three sections. Section One examines representations of the face in war photography, illustrating how photographers have visualised the invisible violence of psychic trauma. Ethical and political concerns are at the forefront of each essay, from the advocacy work of portraiture, to AI tools capable of generating a range of aesthetically convincing yet potentially discriminatory images. Section Two focuses on the aesthetics of the cinematic close-up, drone vision, and how the selective digital colourisation of bodies and faces from archival footage works to impose a moral hierarchy. Section Three concludes the book with a focus on colonisation, decolonisation and defacement, extending earlier discussions of the imperial violence found in recent Hollywood films, where empathy is displaced from the ethnic other to the suffering Western soldier. Our final chapters chart how the face is central to articulating the meaning and sentiment of colonial and civil wars, with even seemingly progressive documentaries perpetuating unequal power dynamics and problematic notions of victimhood. Foregrounding the work of artists and practitioners, alongside theoretical frameworks, War Faces on Screen ultimately forms a radically innovative contribution to the study of image-making and war-making.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: War Faces on Screen
Mani Sharpe (University of Leeds, UK)
Part 1: Photographing Faces of War
1. Now You See Them, Now You Don’t: A Photographic series of Afghan Interpreters and Veteran Advocates in the Aftermath of the War in Afghanistan (2001-2021)
Sara de Jong (University of York, UK) and Andy Barnham (Photographer, UK)
2. Faces of War: An Interview with Alexander Chekmenev
Mani Sharpe (University of Leeds, UK) and Kseniia Lazareva (University of Leeds, UK)
3. Sentimentalizing Trauma: Ways of Seeing War Faces in Visual Generative AI
Katy Parry (University of Leeds, UK) and Giorgia Aiello (University of Milan, Italy)
Part 2: Cinematic Close-ups and Drone Vision
4. The Face, Combat Trauma and the Other in Apocalypse Now
Guy Westwell (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
5. Pathos Signals in the Contemporary American War Film: The Transfer of Affect
Robert Burgoyne (Writer, UK)
6. Target Confirmed: Drone Visuality, Dehumanization, and the Weeping Soldier in Eye in the Sky
Alex Adams (Independent Scholar)
7. Attending the Dead: Digital Colourization, Injury and the First World War Archive
Liz Watkins (University of Leeds, UK)
Part 3: Colonization, Decolonization and Defacement
8. The War Face Off-Screen: Catalogue Descriptions, Imperial Interpellations, and Reading On- and Off-Screen Faces in British Boer War Films
Anushrut Ramakrishnan Agrwaal (University of St Andrews, UK)
9. In Defence of Facelessness: Opacity in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Documentaries Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) and Shoot for the Contents (1992)
Leonie Gschwendtberger (University of Bristol, UK)
10. Screening the Faces and Non-Faces of War: A Political Physiognomy
Mangalika de Silva (New York University, USA)
Index
About the Author :
Katy Parry is Professor of Media and Politics at the University of Leeds, UK. Her books include Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture (2019), co-authored with Giorgia Aiello, and Spaces of War, War of Spaces (Bloomsbury, 2020), co-edited with Sarah Maltby, Ben O’Loughlin and Laura Roselle. She is a co-editor of the journal Media, War & Conflict.
Mani Sharpe is Lecturer in Film at the University of Leeds, UK. He is author of the monograph Late-colonial French Cinema: Filming the Algerian War of Independence (2023). He is generally interested in how films convey the process of military-colonial loss through different formal techniques and themes.
Review :
War Faces on Screen is not just another book about visualizing war, but an incisive critical anatomy of how faces absorb, perform and resist military violence. From disfigured physiognomies to AI-generated pathos, the volume exposes the affective and ideological charge of both full-frontal visibility and strategic opacity. What emerges is a dense interdisciplinary archive of facial aesthetics and politics — from Hollywood close-ups to drone vision, postcolonial defacement to digital gloss. This conceptually rich volume treats the face not as surface but as interface: a screen of projection, a site of trauma and a battleground of meaning. A major contribution to media studies, visual culture and the geopolitics of spectatorship.
War Faces on Screen brings together diverse methodologies and transnational perspectives to examine how faces mediate war across photography, film, protest art and digital media. Bridging traditional disciplinary divides, it offers a brilliant account of the face as both affective portal and complex visual trope, successfully challenging assumptions about humanization and empathy in representations of violence and conflict.
A rich, urgent and highly original collection. It moves effortlessly between important historical contexts of how the face and war has been represented in visual media to what happens with this crucial, and often problematic, visual trope in times of digital, mediatised warfare and the rise of AI. Essential reading for anyone interested in how war is presented to us.
In a time of crisis, with mass death, famine, and anguish returning our gaze from across the media, this important book is particularly urgent, and poignant. At every page the writers point to what we risk—our humanity—when the singular human face is eclipsed, lost in the carnage. The diverse contributions—scholarly and collaborative writings, text-image exchange, and the precious input of practitioners in current war zones—productively bounce against each other, making for a dynamic, rich collection. War’s physical and psychic inscription on the human body meets questions of technology and politics, of aesthetics and ethics, to heighten our understanding of the facial image in history.
