Questioning photographs , asking for the ethical as well as the technical and aesthetic ‘how?’ and ‘why?’ of their making, is now a dominant critical mode. It informs both the choice and arrangement of pictures in the exhibitions, spread across ten sites in southern England, that make up the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial: Memory of Fire, The War of Images and Images of War. In an essay about the exhibitions (‘Rearranging Corpses, Curatorially’ in Photoworks) the curator Julian Stallabrass is clear about the problems that arise when evidence and art mix. He describes a discussion about the inclusion of a large print of a wounded child by Simon Norfolk in The Sublime Image of Destruction, a Biennial exhibition at Bexhill showing very large photographs of destroyed landscapes and smashed buildings:

Both Norfolk and I wanted to show the image because it frankly described the consequences of the war in a way that put viewers (particularly those whose governments are involved in military action) in a deeply disturbing place. Norfolk had been encouraged to take the picture by Iraqis at the scene, doubtless for similar reasons. Nevertheless, the proposed enlargement of the image to museum photography scale, and that it should be displayed under the concept of the sublime, troubled the artist and the curators at the De La Warr Pavilion . . . we eventually decided not to include the print. But our uncertainty about this image raised the difficulty of keeping both particularity and generality in mind: that the cruelties depicted are typical, and that they happen to individuals—to this child who should not be reduced to an icon of the general.

This sensitivity to the tangle of meanings, uses and negotiations that surround war photography marks all the exhibitions in the Biennial. Each has a distinct character—and it is good that they are not shown in one place. Going from Bexhill to Brighton, and from Brighton to Chichester, gives you time to think. The content is wide-ranging; there are old pictures and new ones, museum art and photojournalism, amateur photographs and professional ones. These are didactic exhibitions that draw you into skirmishes on several fronts. Stallabrass is open-minded about the use the contrasts they offer might be put to:

In making that play of contrasts, there has been no conscious compositional effort on my part, but rather an attempt to reach for maximum clarity. This is not to say that one will not emerge or become apparent. Of the (inevitable) question: does your curating have an aesthetic, or, is there a beautiful way to rearrange corpses? On that, I must hold my silence.

The part of the Biennial that has the widest take on the current situation of war photography is Iraq through the Lens of Vietnam at the University of Brighton Gallery. Even when a war is over it is easy to forget there are two views to be looked at. It is a strength of the Brighton exhibition that it has images from the Vietnam and Iraq wars taken by both sides. The stories they offer—our people, good men fighting hard, suffering, dying—mirror one another. Within the period it covers—the sixties through to the present—still photography was losing its role as the dominant visual source of war news, a position it had occupied increasingly since Robert Fenton took pictures during the Crimean War and Mathew Brady during the American Civil War (Brady was in competition with draughtsmen of the calibre of Winslow Homer). The craft of photojournalism developed from those beginnings through two World Wars and the Korean War to reach its apotheosis in Vietnam. By then, though, the end of its dominance was in sight. The picture magazines were not yet dead—Larry Burrows’s work for Life included a famous spread of death and mayhem on a helicopter flight, and long picture essays made during excursions to the front. But they were losing out to the immediacy of television. Don McCullin’s pictures for the Sunday Times were most striking in reproductions in the colour magazine, not in a stand-alone publication. The pictures in the exhibition by Burrows and McCullin show the terror and pity of war, but the time when a photographer could take on a heroic role as chronicler of a nation’s bitter history was coming to a close.

Come Iraq and you are in a new technical environment. Endless images flow from both sides. Digital devices cover the scene so completely that no image is now inherently rare. Even the moment of death becomes a commonplace when armaments picture their own targets. The digital phone with its camera (still or moving) has brought the metaphorical ‘I am a camera’ as close as it could be to a plain truth. So although there are still combat photographers—whose status, when they are ‘embedded’, makes explicit what was always an implied partisanship—their work is challenged by un-composed, un-artful pictures. There are many in these exhibitions taken from blogs, unofficial websites and, most significantly, from the cameras of American soldiers which seem to have a special claim to truth. The wall of pictures showing the humiliation and torture of men in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad are artless, the quality of their flash-lit messiness is something we recognize from the pictures of last night’s party or girls out on the town—the most disturbing images of the war are cousins to those that sit in our own digital cameras. Pictures in the photojournalistic tradition exemplified by the star photographers of the Vietnam War that seemed to offer unmediated truth are, one now sees, exercises in visual rhetoric, using compositional habits and telling gestures that can be tracked back through Goya or Delacroix. They are true in their own way, touching and wonderful, but not visually innocent.

Other Biennial exhibitions show professional photojournalists and photographers finding modern ground not yet overwhelmed by the demotic, digital flood. The large prints in The Sublime Image of Destruction by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Simon Norfolk and Paul Seawright achieve resolution of detail beyond that which can be absorbed on a screen or printed page—that justifies their size. Voluntary acceptance of the limitations on movement and subject matter that come with the big, clumsy cameras needed to produce them sets up a distance between gallery art—which is what they are—and day-to-day reportage. The problem of human relations does not arise or can be sidestepped (as Stallabrass’s and Norfolk’s decision about the photograph of the wounded boy shows). The results are stately, powerful, sometimes bleak and disengaged: that is the price of becoming art, of implying rather than depicting the human predicament, of demanding longer, slower looking from the audience.