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14 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—sequences 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)).
