This is War: British Journal of Photography

BJP August 2014 from 1854 Media on Vimeo.

Text taken from BJP Website:

This year is the centenary of the start of World War I – the war to end all wars that unfortunately didn’t. Like many others, we’ve decided to mark the occasion with a special issue of BJP devoted to images of war.

In our August issue (#7827), This is War, we’ve focused on contemporary conflict rather than the Great War, and deliberately avoided the kind of images familiar from the news.

Instead we look at the everyday experience of war – as it’s experienced by soldiers fighting it, civilians caught up in it, or those watching from the relative security of the sidelines. In this way we hope to investigate how war becomes an everyday fact of life, normalised to the extent that we accept it.

We begin our investigation with Melanie Friend’s photographs of British air shows, which take on a sinister tone, and continue with three portfolios that portray everyday life in the extraordinary circumstances of war: Edmund Clark’s images of Bagram Airfield, the US military’s largest enclave in Afghanistan; Emine Gozde Sevim’s series, Embed in Egypt, a personal exploration of the complexity of Eastern and Western identities; and Kirill Golovchenko’s alternative take on the conflict in Ukraine as evidenced in his images of the barricades that shielded demonstrators, which he photographs as works of art.