The purpose of this article is to introduce and explore the political potential of visual autoethnography. I do so through my experience of working as a Swiss Army officer in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Drawing on my own photographs I examine how an appreciation of everyday aesthetic sensibilities can open up new ways of thinking about security dilemmas. I argue that visual autoethnography can be insightful not because it offers better or even authentic views – it cannot – but because it has the potential to reveal how prevailing political discourses are so widely rehearsed and accepted that we no longer see their partial, political, and often problematic nature. I illustrate this potential in two ways: (1) how a self-reflective engagement with my own photographs of the DMZ reveals the deeply entrenched role of militarised masculinities; (2) how my positionality and my photographs of everyday life in North Korea show that prevailing security discourses are highly particular and biased, even though they are used to justify seemingly objective policy decisions.

中文翻译：

---

视觉自我民族志和国际安全：来自韩国 DMZ 的见解

本文的目的是介绍和探索视觉自我民族志的政治潜力。我是通过在韩国非军事区 (DMZ) 担任瑞士军官的经历来做到这一点的。借助我自己的照片，我研究了对日常审美情感的欣赏如何能够开辟思考安全困境的新方法。我认为，视觉自我民族志之所以具有洞察力，不是因为它提供了更好甚至更真实的观点——它不能——而是因为它有可能揭示流行的政治话语是如何被如此广泛地排练和接受的，以至于我们不再看到它们的局部、政治和经常有问题的性质。我通过两种方式来说明这种潜力：（1）通过我自己拍摄的非军事区照片进行自我反省，如何揭示军事化男子气概的根深蒂固的作用；