For NO WAR, Artist and Collector Jean-Marie Donat has gathered and edited more than 140 screenshots of photographs for sale on eBay. These photographs have been shot during World War II. They show war scenes, mass graves, portraits of Nazi soldiers... Each of them is stamped with a label entitled "NO WAR" crossing out the image. On those screenshots, the photograph showing the horror of war clashes with the additional overwriting message.

In order to bend the very strict rules regarding the fight against glorification of war crimes, the sellers, preventively, clear the sale of their photographs of any intention of propaganda. This process leads to consider historical snapshots, like the ones from the NO WAR corpus, as emancipated of reality. That creates "schizophrenic" text-image compositions which distance the war, treating it like an ancient fact, far from contemporary history.

Since the 1991 Gulf War and its images of a "clean" conflict, photographs which show the reality of war have been almost entirely expelled for the benefit of a video game imagery and pyrotechnic clashes. War is not shown neither in its reality nor in its atrocity anymore.

The decision of publishing this project in 2019 is not trivial. In these times where some historical facts are called into question and where ideological extremism is strongly increasing in Europe, it seems esssential to keep unaltered traces of the real in order to avoid lurching back into past history. Photographs which should allow a crucial memorial work are here denatured, almost annihilated, by an antithetical message.