Abstract

Images of war have an amplified efficacy in cultural contexts that privilege the power of the image and the hegemony of vision. This project animates and explores the recent virtual re-publication and political and cultural positioning of the Aerial Reconnaissance Archive (TARA), a collection of five million WWII Allied aerial reconnaissance photographs. Explicating the ethical tension inherent of the exhibition of photographic images and the problematic hinge between the constellations of aesthetics and politics, this research interrogates the concept of the archive to consider embedded and emerging communicative and technological practices that constitute the discursive articulation and cultural transmission of bodies of political and historical knowledge regarding the Second World War. The archive enables a logistics of perception , revealing the tension inherent in the collection: its visible and intended cultural value as a safe, sanitized object for public historical commemoration in a deregulated cultural economy; and its former function as an assembly of miniature, clinical operational diagrams designed for the application of war-time force and destruction. Following this tension, the collection activates a photographic aesthetic of affect, astonishment, and awe. This aesthetic activates dominant historical and memorial versions of war-time heritage and the contribution of aerial reconnaissance photography, which obfuscates and effaces the real terms of visceral, messy war-time devastation and destruction.