Unfixing the Shadows: Temporality in Social Media Photography of the War in Ukraine

Over the past three years, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been conveyed to global audiences via a complex range of image practices. This has included a distinctive use of TikTok, which disturbs the monocular, stilled and privileged traditional position of the ‘war photographer’, and an opens up old debates about power, violence and visibility. This paper will examine the increasing use of moving image in social media to destabilise the established temporal characteristics of war photography, through a discursive analysis not only of examples from TikTok, but also Instagram’s ‘Stories’ function, in which photography’s convention of ‘fixing’ and ‘capturing’ war are even further destabilised by means of deliberate ephemerality and disappearance.