David Shields is a writer from Seattle who, over the years of getting The New York Times and naturally glancing at the front page, noticed something.

The photographs on A1 of the Gray Lady depicting war were … beautiful. Only, not in a good way, according to Shields. They were alluring and nice in a bad way, so much so that they infuriated him, so he started collecting them one by one, and today they make up a coffee table book coming out soon titled “War is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to Glamour of Armed Conflict”. In it, the photos are reproduced, each on one page, and accompanied by comments from both Shields and art critic Dave Hickey.

Hickey, too, is maddened by the way our mass media visually captures combat — something that’s truly the furthest thing from pretty.

“Combat photographs today are so profoundly touched in the process of bringing them out, that they amount to corporate folk art … they are no longer ‘lifelike’, but rather ‘picture-like’,” he said.

Shields recently sat down with Salon and discussed his impetus for the book, and how he was almost hooked on it:

 You know, as I say on the front of the book, I’ve subscribed to the paper for decades, over the last 20 years … I find myself eagerly awaiting for paper, my little war-porn addiction, and that just seemed to me fundamentally problematic, fundamentally wrong. What was the problem in me, in my head, in my psyche? Was there a problem in the paper, was it in the exchange between the paper and me?

I was seeing something, my eye was noticing this overwhelming pattern of impossibly beautiful photographs that conveyed not the war itself but the war that is a kind of heck, you know, according to the Times, war is heck. What was going on? Was I under-reading the pictures, misreading the pictures? Demanding the pictures be more gritty than they can possibly be?

He also makes some grand comparisons to the level of art achieved in the photos:

I think the pictures are ravishingly beautiful, they’re just Gerhard Richter level, a Jackson Pollock level, Mark Rothko level gorgeousness, but first of all, to me, they seem problematic representations of Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Secondly, they were almost never balanced by [anything] that conveyed anything other than war’s really cool, really glamorous, really bloodless. They feel to me kind of scarily like military recruitment posters. So, so beautiful.

And how they’ve changed in recent times, to what they were during the Civil War, both World Wars, etc.:

From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life … [Now] they’re sending pics digitally, but above all the photo editors and photographers in my view, and Hickey’s view, have gone to school on neo-realist painting, on photo realists painting, on pop art, on abstract expressionism.

If his thesis stands to be true, it’s not terribly surprising — even from the venerable Manhattan paper itself. It’s the state of modern journalism, and photojournalism is no different from any of other forms, and is susceptible to the same trends (positive or negative) that befall written, filmed or spoken media.