Watching war evolve: Photojournalism and new forms of violence

War can consist of someone sitting in a windowless room in Arizona directing a drone strike on a specific house in Yemen. Hardly the stuff of romance - and not likely to produce a good photograph either. Photography has changed: digital technologies have accelerated its comprehensive distribution across all societies, cultures and classes while severing the photographic image from an indexical relationship to its object. If one believes that human conduct is profoundly shaped by culture, then one has to accept that habituation can work in any direction, that there can be cultures of war, and that those cultures can expand through a variety of means beyond actual armed conflict. The idea that violence ‘has become less tethered to its political aims’ has been articulated eloquently by Susie Linfield.