A Thrilling Day Out: Air Shows and Military Spectacle

This chapter discusses the photographic project The Home Front by Melanie Friend. The Home Front offers no easy answers to the dilemma of the militarisation of culture in Britain (or indeed, in other nations), a theme that is bound up in emotional and subjective notions of patriotism and heroism. Yet Friend’s photographs encourage us to move beyond the appeal of military spectacle to begin to detect the politics at work, and to consider how we are collectively recruited to – or actively collude in – the ethos of militarism. The value of her images is not in solving the dilemma, but in making visible those embedded and pervasive cultures of militarisation, laying them bare for debate and discussion, so that we may be cognizant of our complicity.