President Roosevelt created the Office of War Information (OWI) in June 1942 to coordinate efforts to mobilize Americans and improve relations among the Allies. Photography was one of the OWI's important tools of persuasion, and this is the first study to isolate and analyze the three distinct but intersecting branches of OWI photographic activity. This dissertation examines key debates over the agency's activities and argues that the aesthetic variations in OWI photography are integrally related to ideological differences and institutional disputes within the agency. All OWI photography was shaped in part by the dominant aesthetic conventions of modernism, especially those of "glamour aesthetics." But OWI publications and exhibitions also reveal that the agency's work evolved considerably during the war; as a result of the delicate collaboration between various OWI policy makers, editors, designers, writers, technicians, photographers, their subjects and audiences, the purport of the work was repeatedly tested and renegotiated. The three OWI photo units operated by the OWI were: the Stryker unit, formerly with the Farm Security Administration (FSA), and housed in the OWI Domestic Branch publications unit; the Domestic Branch News Bureau photo unit; and the OWI Overseas Branch unit. Two significant photographers from competing OWI photo units receive special attention: Marjory Collins (Stryker unit) and Alfred Palmer (News Bureau unit). Their work is compared to that of contract photographers hired by the Overseas Branch, particularly after the Spring of 1943. Collins's photography, like that of her Stryker unit colleagues, originated in the social reform atmosphere of the 1930s. Although her OWI work followed the agency mandate on celebrating American virtues, her photographs also display her earlier critical attitude. Palmer, by contrast, focused on the immediate objective of winning the war, producing uniformly inspirational imagery. Contract photographers, meanwhile, followed the lead of Palmer's News Bureau unit, but their affirmative photography was designed to shape long-term world opinion, not to mobilize a population for the war effort. Analysis of Collins, Palmer, and the contract photographers makes clear that understanding the photographic images they produced requires close attention to their political, bureaucratic, and cultural background.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/46268 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Carson, Jeanie Cooper |
| Publisher | Boston University |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | This work is being made available in OpenBU by permission of its author, and is available for research purposes only. All rights are reserved to the author. |
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