Visual Studies

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Cold War visual alliances

Sarah Bassnett, Andrea Noble & Thy Phu

To cite this article: Sarah Bassnett, Andrea Noble & Thy Phu (2015) Cold War visual alliances,
Visual Studies, 30:2, 119-122, DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2015.1024976

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2015.1024976

Published online: 15 May 2015.

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 Visual Studies, 2015
Vol. 30, No. 2, 119–122, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2015.1024976

Introduction

Cold War visual alliances

SARAH BASSNETT, ANDREA NOBLE and THY PHU

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)
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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

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
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

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 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 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.

© 2015 International Visual Sociology Association

 120 Introduction
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.
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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
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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
Introduction 121
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.
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.
NOTE
[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.
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 122 Introduction
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