Since modern warfare targeted Western countries, civilian population became both protagonist and victim of the new face of the conflicts: air bombings, repression and rear-garde cleansing, mass exodus and exile. More importantly, these changes run parallel with new regimes of visibility to represent war in the making: light cameras, illustrated press design, newsreels, and later television, worldwide migration of images...

As commonly accepted by historians (see, for example Susan Sontag’s last book, Regarding the Pain of Others), the Spanish Civil War played an important part in this script as its iconography contributed to fix a considerable number of genres that would never disappear from 20th-20st conflicts.

Scarcely six years later, in the spring of 1945, astonished audiences would be shocked by similar images, even though they had achieved an unprecedented degree of inhumanity: columns of refugees, devastated bodies lying in camps, civilians in despair hit by air raids... Yet, the images from the SCW convey a different feeling: regardless of the violence they contain, these photographs and footage seem surrounded by a mysterious aura. Some press correspondents used the word 'photogeny' to describe this singularity. What does this phrase mean when applied to human affliction and what are their limits?