Pierre Schill, The Brutalised Bodies of a Colonial Conquest Before the Court of Global Opinion: Photography, Media Uses and Emotions during the Italo-Turkish War in Tripolitania (1911–12). History of Photography 47 (2023), pp. 315-343

This article analyses the global circulation of around fifty photographs taken at the end of October 1911 at Shar al-Shatt, near Tripoli, by journalists documenting the mass execution of civilians by Italian soldiers. By attending to the interaction of text and image, and to the layouts of visual spreads in the global press, the article demonstrates how photographs of these dead bodies were imbued with a range of political meanings, variously protesting and legitimising such forms of extreme violence. The article explains how the emotions aroused worldwide by these images prompted the Italian authorities to create a visual counter-narrative by publicising photographs of the bodies of their own soldiers mutilated by a ‘bestialised’ enemy. The dissemination of visual evidence of brutality committed by both sides constitutes an early example of a ‘contest of images’ whereby press photography was used to mobilise antagonistic affective communities: variously pan-Islamic, anti-colonial, and trans-imperial. The diversity and inventiveness of the visual politics of persuasion implemented during the conquest of Tripolitania and the intensity of the reactions that this imagery produced reveal the emerging centrality of photojournalists in bearing witness to mass violence in the twentieth century.