War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict*

Product Description

* (in which the author explains why he no longer readsThe New York Times)

Bestselling author David Shields analyzed over a decade’s worth of front-page war photographs from TheNew York Timesand came to a shocking conclusion: the photo-editing process ofthe “paper of record,”by way of pretty, heroic, and lavishly aesthetic image selection, pullsthe woolover the eyes of its readers; Shields forces us to face not only the the media’s complicity in dubious and catastrophic military campaigns but our own as well.This powerful media mouthpiece, the mightyTimes, far from being a check on governmental power, is in reality a massive amplifier for its dark forces by virtue of the way it aestheticizeswarfare. Anyone baffled by the willful American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan can’t help but see in this book how eagerly and invariably theTimesled the way in making the case for these wars through the manipulation of its visuals. Shields forces the reader to weigh the consequences of our own passivity in the face of these images’ opiatic numbing. The photographs gathered inWar Is Beautiful, often beautiful and always artful, are filters of reality rather than the documentary journalism they purport to be.

Review

Challenges the indisputable authority of the paper by claiming 
The Times has sanctified, eroticized and glamorized warfare.
—
LENS CULTURE

Shields believes that the images the
 New York Times chooses set a tone for the rest of the media landscape, and that they can wreak havoc when it comes to an informed populace’s acceptance of the horrors of war.
—
HOPES & FEARS

The disturbingly graphic book follows the 
New York Times’ war reporting for more than a decade, exposing the institution’s tendency to glamorize armed combat to the point of manipulation.
—
THE VILLAGE VOICE

The images that populate 
War Is Beautiful are undeniably beautiful. Whether or not they’re accurate portrayals of war is up to you.

—MOTHER JONES

Propaganda is alive and well and as brazen as ever, as author David Shields exposes in a damning book that points the finger squarely at one of the nation’s most influential media outlets.”
—
WE HEARTDavid Shields’ collage attack on
The New York Times – 
War Is Beautiful – is, quite simply, required reading
. —HUFFINGTON POST

Darkly beautiful and incisive.
—
THE STRANGER 

An examination of how the photography in the 
New York Times seeks to glorify combat.
—
MODERN PAINTERS
War Is Beautiful is the ironic title of a beautiful new book of photographs . . . remarkable . . . powerful . . . There can be no question that Shields has captured a portrait of a day in the life of a war propagandist, and that the photographers, editors, and designers involved have done as much to cause the past 14 years of mass dying, suffering, and horror in the Middle East as has any single 
New York Times reporter or text editor.
—
FOREIGN POLICY JOURNAL

Explosive.

—SEATTLE WEEKLY

Shields has crafted a unique visual antiwar polemic exploring the role of the media in shaping contemporary propaganda.

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Staggering.
—MARK CRISPIN MILLER, NEWS FROM UNDERGROUNDA twisted kind of coffee-table book.
—SALONFor us to be better “consumers” of the visual diet we are being served, we need to acquire the skills that Shields displays here. For any visual-literacy class, War Is Beautiful could serve as a textbook. 
—JORG COLBERG, CONSCIENTIOUS

Shattering.

—NOAM CHOMSKY 

A surprisingly cinematic work of journalism—sometimes disturbingly so.

—IRA GLASS
Hugely brave, persuasive, evocative,
War Is Beautiful places us inside our skins as the semi-conscious, complicit witnesses we’ve been for these past fourteen years now. Shields’ appropriative gestures have led up to something outer-directed and crucially relevant, making a great argument for their strength as a device for inquiry. The result casts a beautiful light back on everything that got him to this point. An astounding accomplishment.

—JONATHAN