ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a social semiotic-based method to studying military image banks. It begins by detailing the increasing influence of image banks in public communication. Like World Wide Web presence, image banks have become a normal part of the internal and external communication practices of the world's militaries. Furthermore, as northern militaries have moved to embrace social media, countries such as United States, Canada, the UK and Australia all have established Flickr photostreams to make their image content readily available to the public. Humanitarian militarism can be characterized as one of a number of closely related discourses on military engagements that have emerged since the Cold War era. All of the photographs, as documentary evidence of the US Department of Defense (DoD) and its members' efforts to provide humanitarian aid, can be said to fall within a naturalistic modality type.
