Iconic Images of Political Violence

This research group, which consists of Jeremy Hicks, Libby Saxton and Guy Westwell, explores iconic photographs of political violence and their after-lives on film, as well as rarer instances of iconic documentary film images and their reproduction as stills.

The project seeks to situate iconic images in their originating national contexts and trace their migration into wider transnational/cosmopolitan/global spaces, paying attention to the ethical dynamics of their subject matter and viewers’ interactions with them.

The digital turn has fundamentally altered the status of the iconic image (as a way of representing the world and as an object of study), and our work seeks suitable ways of tracing, archiving, and understanding iconic images in this dramatically new context.

We seek answers to the following questions:

• How do contexts of film production and reproduction, especially within distinct national histories, film industries, and in relation to discrete historical events, give shape to iconic images?
• What happens to the status of the iconic image over time and as it is reproduced and recontextualised by filmmakers?
• How do iconic images play a role in public understanding of instances of political violence by providing loci for contemplation, interrogation and controversy regarding the image’s meaning, and what is film’s specific role in this process?
• How can iconic photographs be understood in relation to debates about medium specificity, in particular the shift between photograph and film, and between still and moving image?

In addition to a co-authored dossier in Screen, publications arising from the project include:

• Guy Westwell, ‘Acts of Redemption and “The Falling Man” Photograph in Post-9/11 US Cinema’, in American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11, ed. Terence McSweeney (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 67–88
• Jeremy Hicks, The Victory Banner: Cinema, Ritual and Repetition in Russia’s Memory of World War Two (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)
• Libby Saxton, No Power Without an Image: Icons Between Photography and Film(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020)

Events related to the project include:

• At QMUL on 11 October 2023, a screening of three episodes of Distinguished Visiting Fellow Vincent Brown’s (Harvard) PBS seriesThe Bigger Picture, followed by a roundtable conversation between Prof. Brown and members of the iconic images research group.
• A two-day British Academy-funded conference at QMUL in 2017 titled ‘Iconic and Archival Images of World War II’. Speakers included Sylvie Lindeperg, (University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Robert Hariman (Northwestern University School of Communication), John Lucaites (Indiana University) and Anja Tippner (University of Hamburg).
• An international one-day conference at QMUL in 2013 with papers by Richard Raskin (Aarhus), Toby Haggith (Imperial War Museum), Kate McLoughlin (Birkbeck), and Piotr Cieplak (SOAS).
• A series of talks at QMUL in 2012–13 about iconic images and film, including Roy Grundmann discussing the ‘Crystal Image’ as guiding concept in the work of Matthias Müller, Damian Sutton examining the use of digital time-lapse photography of San Francisco in David Fincher’s Zodiac, and David H. Jones exploring the use of iconic images in the work of Silvia Kolbowski.