ABSTRACT
Even before the advent of the Internet, the most important objective of both monument construction and destruction was often to send a message that was mediated by images. The cultural historian Aaron Tugendhaft has pointed out that even the earliest known perpetrators of iconoclasm in the ancient Near East aimed not so much to obliterate all images of a certain kind as to depict themselves destroying particularly important exemplars. 1 Iconic images of well-known monuments being toppled often convey the impression that all monuments of a certain type are being removed, even where that is very far from true. 2 Conversely, monuments are often deliberately built so as to look impressive in photos and drawings—this was certainly the case of war memorials in the Soviet Union. 3 Thus images of monuments have always been at least as important as monuments themselves.
