Florence Anselmo is Head of the Central Tracing Agency and Protection Division at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Between September 2016 and June 2025, she was in charge of the Central Tracing Agency (CTA), leading and coordinating efforts to prevent disappearance, reconnect separated families, bring answers and support to families of missing persons and promote the protection of the dead. For this purpose, she convened on CTA matters across the ICRC and beyond and has overseen the development of a new strategy for Restoring Family Links for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. She is also in charge of the management of protection data.

Florence worked for the ICRC from 2001 until 2007, first as Field Delegate in Colombia, then as Head of Sub-Delegation in Burundi and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. From 2007 until 2016 she worked for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in Jerusalem as protection coordinator, setting up and developing UNRWA’s protection strategy and activities in the West Bank. She holds a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in political sciences from the University of Lausanne.

Dr Pierre Guyomarc’h is Head of Forensics at the ICRC. A forensic anthropologist trained at the University of Bordeaux (MSc 2008, PhD 2011), his research has focused on human identification, medical imaging and craniofacial analysis. He previously worked at the US Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, contributing to the identification of missing service members while advancing innovative forensic methods. Since joining the ICRC in 2014, Pierre has led forensic operations in contexts such as Ukraine, Lebanon and Georgia, and he has overseen programmes from headquarters since 2017. Today, he directs a global team of around 100 experts implementing humanitarian forensic action in conflict and crisis-affected settings worldwide.

Stephen Fonseca has been involved in medicolegal death investigation for over twenty-seven years, with a focus on forensic human identification and on education and professional development in forensic investigations and emergency management. He has co-authored several articles on forensic human identification. As a coroner in Canada, he led the development of a provincial forensic identification system to concurrently address recently reported and historical unsolved identification cases and managed the Identification and Disaster Response Unit (IDRU) in British Columbia for eight years. The IDRU was regionally recognized for the implementation of the multidisciplinary Identification Information Management Model, for which Stephen received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. He joined the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 2013, initially working in the Middle East and thereafter supporting authorities primarily in Africa and globally with the implementation of well-functioning medico-legal systems and improvement of forensic identification in peacetime as well as during and after conflict, disasters and migration. He is currently the Head of the ICRC’s African Centre for Medicolegal Systems, a satellite hub of the Central Tracing Agency’s (CTA) Advisory Red Cross and Red Crescent Missing Persons Centre. Stephen leads the ICRC’s global Military Personnel Identification (MPI) Project, working with State armed forces around the world to develop global guidelines and implement measures to reduce the number of military personnel who become unaccounted for.

Vaughn Rossouw is an admitted Advocate of the High Court of South Africa. He holds an LLB and an LLM (cum laude) in public international law from the University of Pretoria, specializing in international humanitarian law (IHL) and human rights in military operations. Vaughn joined the ICRC in 2022 as Legal Adviser to the CTA’s African Centre for Medicolegal Systems, advising State authorities and stakeholders in the forensic science services sector on the applicable international and domestic legal frameworks with respect to missing persons and their families, and on the dignified management of the dead in armed conflict and other situations of violence. Vaughn was featured in the Review’s “Emerging Voices” issue of 2021 and has co-authored publications on transnational investigative approaches to address missing and deceased migrants in Southern Africa together with colleagues at the ICRC Pretoria Regional Delegation.

The circulation of harrowing war images on traditional and social media – beheaded soldiers, mutilated bodies and civilians burned alive by flames – underscores a profound and enduring connection between war, death and photography. While this nexus is not novel, contemporary developments in the speed, scale and permanence of visual media have opened new questions worth examining. This article aims to dig deeper into whether and how the normative landscape for protecting the inherent dignity of the deceased is evolving and the role that new challenges posed by digital media and the pervasive nature of contemporary visual media play in this process. The relevance of this study rests on the premise that ongoing academic and public debates tend to focus on the issue of media censorship, overshadowing critical inquiries into the legitimacy and legality of the display of certain images. Thus, it is argued that, in the context of publishing and disseminating images of the war dead, it is essential to examine not only what is hidden but also what is shown and how. This is especially pertinent given the asymmetric representation of death and conflict in the Western media, which frequently reinforces distant, “othering” perspectives. Finally, by examining the issue through multiple lenses, namely those of international humanitarian law, international human rights law and international criminal law, this study aims to provide a more comprehensive framework for addressing the ethical and legal dilemmas posed by war photography in the digital age.