Cold War Camera

by Thy Phu (Editor), Erina Duganne (Editor), Andrea Noble (Editor)

Overview

Cold War Camera explores the visual mediation of the Cold War and illuminates photography’s role in shaping the ways it was prosecuted and experienced. The contributors show how the camera stretched the parameters of the Cold War beyond dominant East-West and US-USSR binaries and highlight the significance of photography from across the global South. Among other topics, the contributors examine the production and circulation of the iconic figure of the “revolutionary Vietnamese woman” in the 1960s and 1970s; photographs connected with the coming of independence and decolonization in West Africa; family photograph archives in China and travel snapshots by Soviet citizens; photographs of apartheid in South Africa; and the circulation of photographs of Inuit Canadians who were relocated to the extreme Arctic in the 1950s. Highlighting the camera’s capacity to envision possible decolonialized futures, establish visual affinities and solidarities, and advance calls for justice to redress violent proxy conflicts, this volume demonstrates that photography was not only crucial to conducting the Cold War, it is central to understanding it.

Contributors. Ariella Azoulay, Jennifer Bajorek, Erina Duganne, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Eric Gottesman, Tong Lam, Karintha Lowe, Ángeles Donoso Macaya, Darren Newbury, Andrea Noble, Sarah Parsons, Gil Pasternak, Thy Phu, Oksana Sarkisova, Olga Shevchenko, Laura Wexler, Guigui Yao, Donya Ziaee, Marta Ziętkiewicz

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478015956
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	12/16/2022
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Thy Phu is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, and author of Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam, also published by Duke UniversityPress.

Erina Duganne is Professor of Art History at Texas State Universityand author of The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography.

Andrea Noble (1968–2017) was Professor of Latin American Studies at Durham Universityand author of Mexican National Cinema.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations  ix
Acknowledgments  xv
Cold War Camera: An Introduction / Thy Phu, Andrea Noble, and Erina Duganne  1
Visual Alliances
1. Ernest Cole's House of Bondage, the United States Information Agency, and the Cultural Politics of the World War / Darren Newbury  33
2. Icon of Solidarity: The Revolutionary Vietnamese Woman in Vietnam, Palestine, and Iran / Thy Phu, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandi, and Donya Ziaee  67
3. Group Material's "Art for the Future": Visualizing Transnational Solidarity at the End of the Global Cold War / Erina Duganne  113
4. Interrogating the Cold War's Geo-Politics from Down South: Chile from Within (1990) and the Construction of a Situated Visuality / Ángeles Donoso Macaya  143
5. Decolonization and Nonalignment: African Futures, Lost and Found / Jennifer Bajorek  167
Photo Essays
6. Bifurcated and Parallel Histories / Tong Lam  195
7. Preservation of Terror / Eric Gottesman  203
Structures of Seeing
8. Ending World War II: The Visual Literacy Class in Cold War Human Rights / Ariella Aïsha Azoulay  213
9. “Planted There Like Human Flags”: Photographs of the High Arctic and Cold War Anxiety, 1951–1956 / Sarah Parsons  239
10. Urban Albums, Village Forms: Chinese Family Photographs and the Cold War / Laura Wexler, Karintha Lowe, and Guigui Yao  263
11. Travel, Space, and Belonging in Soviet Domestic Photo Collections of the Cold War Era / Oksana Sarkosova and Olga Shevchenko  293
12. Exhibiting Ethnic Minorities, Democratizing History: Cold War Legacies and the Jews in Poland's Visible Sphere / Gil Pasternak and Marta Ziętkiewicz  327
Bibliography  359
Contributors  389
Index  395

What People are Saying About This

Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History - Patricia Hayes

“This bold reframing of the understandings of the Cold War through questions of visuality and photography transcends the conventional Soviet—USA geopolitical axis by accounting for global South dynamics beyond the limited nomenclature of subsidiary proxy wars. This timely book breaks scholarship on photography out of the problematic Euro-American orientation, and it will undoubtedly spark considerable debate.”

Christopher Pinney

“A sparkling and expertly sculpted set of essays that brings a neglected period and politics into new and vivid focus. Understanding the Cold War as a global conflict (as much North—South as East—West) the volume lays out an authoritative new cultural cartography showing how power and visibility were distributed. Providing a valuable optic on past history, it also now serves as a lens on a rapidly darkening future.”