Photographic portraits, the late Alex Danchev suggests in On Art and War and Terror (published in 2009), “are not merely illustrations of what was already known. They are new knowledge” (p. 36) and a fiction may be “a type of truth” (p. 148), requiring new thinking and writing techniques to grasp what is normally considered intangible, ephemeral, even – from the point of view of most scholarship – irrelevant. This book shows that it is not irrelevant: “art articulates a vision of the world that is insightful and consequential; and the vision and the insight can be analysed” (p. 4).
