With the First World War, a new image motif emerges in the field of photography and art that continues to this day: the motif of the bomb crater. This monograph is the first study to present this historically new landscape image in its formal transformations, changing uses, and semantics. In five chapters, significant epochal conflicts are explored iconographically: World War I, World War II, nuclear weapons tests, the Vietnam War, and Islamist terrorism. The various visual expressions and their respective time-bound contexts—places of war, warfare, production, and reception conditions of the images—are understood as communications that provide insight into specific cultural affective states: regarding traumatizations and existential experiences, mourning work, denial, and fantasies of grandeur.