Visions of War

From the dawn of time to the present, from the days of mammoth hunting to the era of Scud-busting, pictures of war constitute the most persistent genre of images human beings have created. In fact, human beings are the only creatures who engage in these two activities—organized violence and the making of pictorial images—and the author shows how both art and war emerge from the same source: the hunter's eye.

This book explores and analyzes the thirteen thousand-year legacy of pictures of war from various cultures over the centuries, from the Stone Age cave paintings and monumental sculpture of the ancient Near East to the art of the classical period and the Middle Ages, from pre-contact Mesoamerican imagery to Napoleonic propaganda and totalitarian art and on to the instantaneous images of the Gulf War.

David D. Perlmutter is currently area head for political communication at the Manship School of Mass Communication, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. He is the author of Photojournalism and Foreign Policy and has published articles in a number of scholarly journals, including Historical Methods, Visual Anthropology, and Journal of Communication.