The Cold War of global warming: recycled visual narratives from the top of the world

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to analyze the parallels and transformations between Arctic visual narratives in America during the Cold War of the 1950s and those in the era of climate change in the twenty-first century. The work will explore how the American narrative of the Arctic has retooled Cold War aesthetic codes for the challenges of climate change. The research will focus on case studies of Arctic photography and videography in two discrete 15-year periods, from 1945–1960 and 2000–2015 for the Cold War and climate change, respectively. Through these comparative snapshots or samples, it will contend that two major, persistent themes – the Arctic as a distant early warning system and Arctic inhabitants as important holders of local knowledge – have been borrowed and refitted from America's Cold War polar visualization to inform climate narratives today.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• Cold War
• visual narrative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Victoria Herrmann http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1117-7499