ABSTRACT
In January 1999 a photograph from Račak, Kosovo appeared in the world’s press. Senior media colleagues on the ground in Pristina said it marked a turning point in launching NATO into the war with Milošević’s Serbia. They were supported in this view by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and numerous other observers. The power of a specific image to generate what military historian Corelli Barnett (Daily Telegraph 1999: 6) called the ‘first aggressive war in a Europe at peace since Nazi Germany invaded Poland in Sept 1939’ must surely rank as one definition of the iconic. It is the same politicized kind of icon as the Bosnian Trnopolje images which, Hoskins and O’Loughlin (2010: 95) argue, demonized ‘the whole Serbian people via the media, thus legitimating the necessity and inevitability of US military intervention’.
