Chris Much Bermudez explores two examples of forensic and imaginative war photography, as well as the problems each encounters. “The Forensic Turn” and “Media and Myth: Mass Media and the Vietnam War” exhibitions, curated by Paul Lowe, Monica Alcazar-Duarte and Ziyah Gafić, explore different angles on war journalism and the stories told by depictions of conflict. On 30 June, as part of the 2015 WARM Festival, the Post-Conflict Research Center’s (PCRC) Velma Šarić joined the curators for a tour of both exhibitions and a panel discussion on contemporary depictions of conflict and the role that art plays in reconciling a violent past. This article will first explore the content and message behind “Media and Myth”, which was briefly touched upon during the panel discussion, but mainly expanded on by Alcazar-Duarte during her tour of the exhibition, before covering the panelists’ views on “The Forensic Turn” and its exploration of the role of art in remembering conflict. Alcazar-Duarte’s “Media and Myth” examines how aspects of the Vietnam War have become ingrained in popular culture. One piece visualizes the ‘iconization’ of the AK-47 by laying out hundreds of thumbnails of the weapon from a Google Image search. Why is the AK-47 iconic? First of all, because it symbolizes the Vietnam army’s resistance to the better equipped US Army. But mainly, according to Duarte, because of the influence of popular culture. The AK-47 is a classic example of the glorification of weaponry and the seamless integration of this phenomenon into the media and modern society. Another section of the exhibit is dedicated to Stanley Kubrick’s film Full Metal Jacket and its depiction of Vietnam. This section explores how Kubrick’s attention to detail in set design allowed him to make parts of London look like Vietnam. For example, Kubrick used explosives and a wrecking ball to turn the disused Beckton Gas Works in London into something resembling a war-torn Vietnam. When speaking about this work, Alcazar-Duarte placed a particular focus on Kubrick’s “perforating mythology”. In other words, how the actual production of Full Metal Jacket explored the myth that was established about the war and consequently spread by the media. Kubrick showed how easy it was to transform London into Vietnam, simply with the use of explosives and careful placement of palm trees. He transformed one thing into another, artistically recreating a conflict. Thus, the exhibition aims to re-contextualize Kubrick’s work, underlining the power that art and the media have in telling a story, showing how easy it is to mythologize a war and obscure particular narratives. In doing so, it also highlights how we should always be wary of information received from mass the media. These were the kinds of issues that inspired Alcazar-Duarte and the artists behind the exhibition to investigate the intersection between media, journalism, art and conflict. Alcazar-Duarte added that because much of the work was unable to be explained by captions alone, the artists crafted essays to further explain parts of the exhibition and the motives behind each piece. These served to confirm the idea that there is a lot more to be said about the artworks, but also war, than media often allows. At the same panel discussion, Paul Lowe introduced his work “The Forensic Turn” with a number of probing starting questions: “How should you photograph the un-photographable?” and “how do you represent the past?” War photography often utilizes graphic imagery that incurs many ethical implications. For example, victims of violence or torture may not want a photograph of an injured, mutilated or deceased relative or themselves to be published because it may reawaken traumas of the past. Furthermore, being repeatedly exposed to explicit imagery may actually desensitize the audience to the conflict, dampening their emotional response and running the risk of them no longer internalizing the gravity of the scene being portrayed. Such a phenomena is of particular concern given that pictures of traumatized people and war-struck towns or cities are becoming commonplace in modern media coverage. In response, Lowe’s exhibition aims to portray conflict without the explicit imagery to which we are becoming accustomed. Instead, it aims to portray conflict through the presence of absence. The exhibition focuses on artistically showing the audience the forensic element of conflict. One of the pieces, for example, lines up a multitude of pictures of shoes and sandals of missing persons, while another large print eerily portrays the empty bedroom of a missing person. As Lowe explained, the forensic turn in photography aims to avoid victimization and ethical issues by focusing on “giving the banal a story”.