Spatiotemporal unfixing, image-flow & palinode in photography of the Ukraine war

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been conveyed to global audiences via a complex range of image practices. This has included digital content that disturbs the traditionally monocular, stilled and privileged position of the ‘war photographer’. This is a theoretical discussion of the functions of social media in destabilising the established temporal characteristics of war photography, focusing on two examples from the work of photojournalist Lynsey Addario in her coverage of the war in Ukraine. It includes a discussion of Instagram’s ‘Stories’ function, in which photography’s ‘fixing’ and ‘capturing’ of war are challenged by means of deliberate, in-built ephemerality. The concept of the palinode – a change of mind or position – is used to further conceptualise war photography’s new and uncharted networks of digital proliferation, potentially representing a kind of unfixing of the atrocity image within what Jay Prosser (2012) has called ‘image-flows’, and making it possible for the limits of photojournalism’s technical and ideological stillness – its fixity – to be challenged.