Abstract
<JATS1:p>This ground-breaking collection brings together a diverse array of scholars who interrogate how the suffering, exhilaration, and memory of wars – both past and present – have been mediated through the visual trope of the face.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>The essays demonstrate that this trope is found in a long history of artistic trends: from the so-called ‘spirit photographs’ that emerged during the American Civil War, depicting the faces of soldiers blurred by the effects of double exposure, to Tom Lea’s famous 1944 painting of a shell-shocked marine, entitled ‘That 2,000-Yard Stare’, to the invention of the cinematic facial close-up in the 1910s, as famously deployed in D.W. Griffith’s war-epic, The Birth of the Nation (1915), right through to more contemporary, facially-orientated, innovations in photojournalism, AI-image generation, digital colourisation, and visual social media platforms (such as Instagram, TikTok), all of which have been deployed to both document and distort the phenomenon of war.</JATS1:p>