Cold War visual alliances

Now we must be ready for a new danger. The atomic bomb. First you have to know what happens when an atomic bomb explodes. You’ll know when it comes. We hope it never comes. But we must get ready. It looks something like this …. (Duck and Cover, US Civil Defence Film, 1951)

One morning in 1962 […] Cuban peasants stepped out of their houses, looked across their gardens, and saw ballistic missiles rolling past. ‘I saw these weird weapons’, said an unnamed interviewee, who appeared in CNN’s cold war documentary series; ‘I said to my friend Pablo, “Pablo, how powerful are these weird weapons?” and he answered, “These are nuclear missiles”. So I thought, “Oh really powerful”’ ‘And they just put them here’, said the campesino pointing to his field ‘out in the open’. (Grandin 2010, 2)

What did the Cold War look like? And what did it mean to look during the period of global history that ran approximately from the end of the Second World War to the early 1990s? That is, what was the role of visuality at a time when, according to conventional accounts, the world divided along an East–West ideological axis? The Cold War enters the Western visual field most clearly through iconic images that served manifold functions, the most important of which were the flexing of military muscle and the waging of ideological battle. To borrow the words of the narrative voice-over of Duck and Cover, the Cold War looks something like this: it is the mushroom cloud of nuclear annihilation and aerial surveillance photographs; it is the, to contemporary eyes, almost comic civil defence films, such as Duck and Cover, in which Bert the Turtle shows American schoolchildren what to do in the event of a nuclear attack; and it is the ballistic missiles that roll, in surreal fashion, before the very eyes of Cuban peasants in 1962.¹ What the Cold War looked like, and the related significance of looking to its prosecution, is crucial to understanding a conflict that, it is claimed, has not yet ended (Joseph 2010, 402). As Joseph Masco (2014) has powerfully demonstrated in a study of the overlapping structures of the US Cold War state project and the post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’, culture – and visual culture in particular – had a key role to play in the imaginative and affective construction of a conflict that, in the United States (US) at least, lacked material reality.

The Cold War was fought on dispersed fronts and in wide-ranging forms and it follows that the visual culture of this extended period of conflict is no less varied. The workings of power are manifest at once in what can be readily seen; in, that is, the metanarrative of the US/USSR bipolarity that still captures the Western popular imagination. Indeed, while the Cold War might have lacked material reality in the US, elsewhere, far from there being ‘nothing to see’, it played out in vicious civil wars and (the threat of) terror on ‘an almost inconceivable scale’ (Grandin 2010, 2). Just as importantly, the workings of power are palpable in what is summarily disregarded and outside the field of vision altogether, through obscuring and even erasing evidence of proxy violence that erupted in sites beyond the framework of this bipolarity, namely the global South. What can be seen, what can be known and, conversely, what has been obscured and remains to be recognised? We contend that these pivotal questions of visuality are integral to an analysis of the global Cold War.

‘Cold War Visual Alliances’ is a special issue that explores how visuality – approached as a variegated modality of power that selectively and strategically renders sites and subjects visible and invisible – informs the cultural politics of the Cold War. By foregrounding the visuality of the Cold War we take up the call, made in the landmark scholarship of John Lewis Gaddis (2005), Heonik Kwon (2010) and Odd Arne Westad (2007) amongst others, to take seriously the global scope of this ‘other Cold War’. In contrast to these important works, however, we treat visual culture as a vital part of this new history, and not just as a backdrop to events. Although Frances Saunders (1999) has demonstrated the importance of culture in forming and disseminating Cold War ideologies, most analyses of the visual culture of the Cold War emphasise cultural diplomacy, from Saunders’s work on psychological warfare, to Serge Guibault’s (1983) seminal work on how the American government used abstract painting to promote democracy, to name just two.

Taking inspiration from Masco’s recent study of how visual culture simultaneously elicits and manages fear, this special issue hopes to spark new ways of understanding the impact of different forms of visuality – photography, installation, exhibition, film, amongst others – and their intersections. We are interested in their role in brokering the ideological connections and disconnections between such discourses as deterrence, trauma, revolution, multiculturalism and humanism. We deploy the concept of alliances not only to reveal how visual networks contributed to the development of cultural and ideological alignments, but also to consider the possibilities of ‘misalliances’ – that is, moments when belief systems broke down and visuality itself was renounced. Our contributors explore and account for the relationship between visual alliances and Cold War ideological alignments.

When Edward Steichen’s highly influential The Family of Man exhibit travelled to Cold War proxy zones in the global South, what affiliations and dis-identifications did the exhibition inspire and provoke? How might humanist photography align with the globalising behavioural sciences in constructing a discourse of development for the management of so-called backward peoples in regions subject to competing visions of modernity? What lessons did photography draw from film, when it came to the production of secret surveillance archives? How might the juxtaposition of material and visual culture in an installation by art collective Group Material unsettle conventional understandings of the Cold War? These are just some of the questions that our contributors take up here.

In addressing these questions, the articles in this volume reorient focus from the East–West axis of the US/USSR bipolarity that has shaped Cold War metanarratives to emphasise the North–South axis, which has largely been overlooked in conventional histories. Our objective in so doing is not historical recovery for its own sake. Rather, our aim in turning to these disparate sites is to spark new ways of engaging with the global dimensions of visual analysis, by broadening nationally bounded critique.

Eric Sandeen’s article launches this critical reorientation by offering a fresh look at one of the most popular photographic exhibitions produced and circulated during the Cold War, Edward Steichen’s epoch defining 1955 The Family of Man exhibition. In ‘The Family of Man in Guatemala’, Sandeen explains the vexed reception of the exhibition in Guatemala, where one of the first Cold War proxy conflicts erupted when the CIA participated in the overthrow of the democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz, unleashing a bloody, decades-long civil war. Sandeen explores some of the ways photographs were used to forge alliances and convey ideology across cultures. He contrasts Steichen’s humanism with what he calls the forensic humanism of contemporary human rights organisations engaged in identifying victims of state-sanctioned attacks on Guatemala’s indigenous people, and in doing so demonstrates how photographs work in multiple ways to disseminate and challenge dominant ideologies.

While humanism is the driving force in Sandeen’s article, it poses a problem when it comes to documenting the process of Andean modernisation in the wake of growing fears of Soviet influence in Latin America, an issue that Jason Pribilsky explores in ‘Developing Selves: Photography, Cold War Science and ‘Backwards’ People in the Peruvian Andes, 1951–1966’. Through a careful archival analysis of the work of anthropologist John Collier Jr., Pribilsky argues that the future-oriented task of illustrating modernisation, while it sought to distance itself from backward-looking salvage ethnography, could not fully reconcile the conflicting mandates of objective behavioural sciences and subjective humanist documentation. Likewise, the failure to reconcile ideals with the brutal realities that emerged in their stead is the focus of Ileana Selejan’s article, ‘War in Paradise: Solentiname and the Sandinista Revolution’. In this article, Selejan explores the revolutionary community that emerged on the island of Solentiname on Lake Nicaragua. Focusing on a range of photographic projects that document this unique enclave, Selejan asks to what extent is utopia necessary to sustain revolutionary ideals, examining the way in which photography at once participates in the construction of utopia and at the same time lays bare the apocalypse that is latent in the utopia of Solentiname.

Martha Langford’s article takes us north, to situate Canada’s liberal discourse of multiculturalism within the cultural politics of the global Cold War. ‘Calm, Cool and Collected: Canadian Multiculturalism (domestic globalism) through a Cold War Lens’ explains the productiveness of multiculturalism in generating visual documents, from photography, film and slides, that served as a means of creating calm, order and collective identity in the wake of the Cold War’s cultures of fear and insecurity.

Heather Diack’s article, ‘Hand Over Fist: A Chronicle of Cold War Photography’, considers how an activist art collective – Group Material – referenced North–South alignments in their exhibition, Timeline: The Chronicle of U.S. Invention in Latin and Central America, to draw attention to America’s protection of international trade networks through political interference. Through a nuanced discussion of the motif of the hand, both as a sign of the labourer’s work and symbol of revolt, Diack argues that this exhibition used visual juxtapositions to create new associations that aligned conflicts across different geographic areas and time periods to critique American interventions in Central and Latin America. Meanwhile, Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman are similarly interested in the relationship between North (Lookout Mountain Observatory in Hollywood, California) and South (Vietnam). In their article, ‘Visualities of Strategic Vision: Lookout Mountain Laboratory and the Deterrent State from Nuclear Tests to Vietnam’, they consider the US’s variegated visual strategies for producing knowledge, which bring together the cinematic and the cybernetic as powerful instruments of the Cold War, particularly in crafting ‘deterrence’ as an offensive weapon. Given the prominence of Vietnam as a watershed in visual history – many historians contend that coverage of this conflict influenced war photography (e.g. Arlens 1968; Small 1994; Hoskins 2004; Kennedy 2008) – it is only fitting that we conclude with Franny Nudelman’s work, which turns, rather contrarily, to the impact of the anti-war movement on the therapeutic and photographic conventions of the Vietnam era. In ‘New Soldiers and Empty Boys: Imaging Traumatic Memory’, Nudelman reverses critical commonplaces that stress the importance of visuality in this era, by revealing how anti-war veterans sidelined visuality by deferring instead to testimony and narration as a preferred vehicle for recollecting trauma. Yet the suspicion and consequent eschewal of visuality by veteran activists also implies its power.

Taken together, the articles included in this special issue illuminate sometimes surprising linkages between diverse forms of visual culture and explain visuality’s manifold cultural functions within a transnational context. They do so at a moment in which the Cold War continues to resonate globally: in the 2013 Efraín Ríos Montt genocide trial in Guatemala; in the onset in early 2014 of the crisis in Crimea, leading to claims that the world faces a ‘second’ Cold War, and in the late 2014 thawing of US-Cuba relations. In this conjuncture, these articles demonstrate the significance of visual culture in forging global networks and in the reverberations of the Cold War.

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) for their support of this research.

Notes on contributors

Sarah Bassnett

Sarah Bassnett is Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University in Canada. Her book, Picturing Liberalism: Photography and the Making of Modern Toronto, is forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Andrea Noble

Andrea Noble is Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Durham, UK, where she is founding member of Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies, which now forms part of Durham’s recently formed Centre for Visual Arts and Cultures. Her publications include Photography and Memory in Mexico: Icons of Revolution and two co-edited books: Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative and Photography: Theoretical Snapshots.

Thy Phu

Thy Phu is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University in Canada. Her first book is Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture and her second book (co-edited with Elspeth Brown) is Feeling Photography.

Notes

[1] Duck and Cover can be consulted at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvChsvdPGjA&list=PL4EF44AF5811A4B7E&index=6. See Masco (2014) for an analysis of the US Civil Defense Program.