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Dagnoslaw Demski, Liisi Laineste, Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska
War photography dates back to 1846. About a century later, in the second half
of the twentieth century, advances in technology made the medium more popular
among the masses (Tucker et al 2012). Photo reportages and photo essays—se¬
quences of pictures with some text—became part of illustrative journals from the
1930s onwards. They were motivated by the increasing need of the audience to
witness all events not only in verbal form but also in images. Photography became
a source of information”. However, documentary pictures were not as unbiased or
objective as they seemed (Butler 2010; Apel 2012; see also Kalniuk; Manikowska,
this volume). There are always two levels—the events as they occur in reality and
the events as depicted in representations—and this is why it is worth focusing on
the ideology behind the documentary practices during wartime that either serve
to raise ‘us’ onto a pedestal or construct the image of the enemy, the defeated, the
Other, ‘them’ (see Demski; Kleemola, this volume).
In contrast, caricature sets off from different premises. The implicit aim of
caricature is to sketch and exaggerate, not depict ‘neutrally’. In this volume, we
use the term caricature to denote humorous satirical drawings in order to point
out the politicised content of the genre.? It is also a more historical term, used
when talking about visual political satire in the form of engravings and lithographs
from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The term cartoon, on the other
hand, is used as a more general umbrella term for all humorous visual pictures (or
verbal-visual combined; see also Hempelmann & Samson 2008). The power of
caricature is vested in the recognisable, although grossly and blatantly exaggerated,
image of the Other. It places the Other outside the normal, the accepted and the
conventional, visualising the nascent juxtaposition through ridiculous details like
playing with the proportions of the body, adding animal body parts, depicting
the target as involved in some shameful activity etc. Although the main targets of
caricaturists have usually been the clergy, politicians, noblemen and other well-off
social groups, interethnic conflict may turn primary attention to ethnic targets and
their bizarre, abnormal ways. In this case, caricature often uses ethnic features to
depict the enemy as the Other.
In the context of war, humour may seem slightly inappropriate a phenomenon
to address. Nevertheless, it is relevant to ask, drawing on previous studies (see e.g.
Davies 2002; Stokker 1997), if humour disappears during war; are humour and
straightforward degrading propaganda mutually exclusive or can humour function
predictably in the hands of the communicator who wishes to make a point about
? "The American magazine Life, which was for a considerable time a synonym for the attitude that
photography is a source of information and is documentary, existed until 1972, then losing its position
to television (Kempf 2014: 118).
3 Caricature has its roots in medieval social life and art. It mocked the elite classes and aimed to achieve
a (temporary) reversal of social order, similar to carnivals (see “Caricature” in the Encyclopedia of Humor
Studies (2014)).