For decades, upon opening the New York Times every morning and contemplating the front page, I was entranced by the war photographs. My attraction to the photographs evolved into a mixture of rapture, bafflement, and repulsion. Over time, I realized that these photos glorified war through an unrelenting parade of beautiful images whose function is to sanctify the accompanying descriptions of battle, death, destruction, and displacement. I didn’t completely trust my intuition, so over the last year, I went back and reviewed New York Times front pages from the invasion of
Afghanistan in 2001 to the present. When I gathered together hundreds and hundreds of images, I found my original take corroborated: The governing ethos was unmistakably one that glamorized war and the sacrifices made in the service of war…