ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with some general considerations about the emergence of a visual democracy and the space occupied by staged imagery of killing and torture (SIKT) within a context of greater popular access to the visual. It focuses on SIKT as a form of semiotic warfare, involving the deployment of strategically chosen signs and viewing scripts. The chapter discusses the ethical aspects of seeing atrocity images, leading, to a consideration of curating as a potentially helpful concept with which to make sense of seeing as a political activity that is increasingly performed online by users deploying the creative affordances of the Internet. SIKT is very much like a piece of performance art, turning torture and execution into spectacle. The camera is not there to simply record and witness war in the style of traditional war photography: a reality is created mainly so that it can be captured by the camera, turning the latter into an implement of torture.
