As we settle down in front of our TV screens to view the kick-off of the latest installment in the soap opera we call war, here are some rare pictures from the mother of all media(ted) conflicts: the first gulf war. As Peter Turnley, the photographer, points out in the intro:

"This past war and any one looming, have often been treated as something akin to a 'Nintendo game'. This view conveniently obscures the vivid and often grotesque realities apparent to those directly involved in war. As a witness to the results of this past Gulf War, this televised, aerial, and technological version of the conflict is not what I saw and I'd like to present some images that I made that represent a more complete picture of what this conflict looked like."

With mainsteam media washing wars whiter than white, removing all those unsightly stains humans make, Turnley's photos remind us of both the horror of war and the censorship that surrounds that horror. But if technology is used to "hide" the full media picture - to paraphrase Kubrick's film - will new forms of war journalism emerge, following bottom-up news models, to counteract this trend? As video capture tools become embedded in mobile devices (here's today's product announcement), will they change they way we treat and deal with reality? Yesterday punto-informatico reported (in Italian) how the use of videophones has been banned in the changing rooms of some sport centres in Scotland (and in the whole of Saudi Arabia). "It doesn't exist if it's not in the frame", marixxx often says, quoting murnau.