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Description - Private Pictures by Janina Struk

Snapshots taken by American soldiers of Iraqi prisoners stripped naked, humiliated and tortured, shocked the worldin 2004. But, as Private Pictures reveals, far from this beinga phenomenon of the digital and Internet age, soldiers havebeen taking photographs of war for more than 100 years.

Janina Struk has traced thousands of soldiers' images and follows this unacknowledged genre from the Boer Warto the twenty-first-century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this fascinating book she tells stories that reveal how soldiers' pictures were used by the British press to thwart official censorship during the First World War as well as the controversies caused by pictures taken by German soldiers of Nazi crimes during the Second World War. She tells of how British soldiers faced a court martial accused of taking cruel images in Iraq, and how former Israeli soldiers are exhibiting their own snapshots taken in the Occupied Palestinian Territories to raise awareness of the corruption of occupation.

Private Pictures discusses the significance of these and other images and asks what effect a wider appreciation of soldiers' pictures might have on the popular perception of war, and importantly, on war photography.

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