« La nature de l’ennemi »

Résumé 0

Soon after Pearl Harbor, on June 13, 1942, the Office of War Information was established within The Office of Emergency Management, precursor one might say to the current Department of Homeland Security. The job of the OWI was to coordinate information about the war that the government wanted disseminated, or controlled. The OWI both commissioned and accumulated photographs by commercial and official photographers of all the service branches, to be used in OWI exhibitions. It also acquired some photographs from official foreign outlets, and from non-military branches of the government such as the Soil Conservation Service and the Farm Security Administration.Many of these photographs were published in magazines such as Victory, Rural America, The Parade, and USA. But the OWI also mounted live exhibitions that attracted thousands of members of the public. Rockefeller Center was considered highly desirable as a venue on account of its generous outdoor as well as interior public spaces and, as well, the cooperative local presence of the NBC broadcasting studios. In 1943 the OWI sponsored there a six month, six-part series of exhibitions including “United Nations,” “The Nature of the Enemy,” “Sacrifice,” “Armed Forces,” “The Home Front,” and “The Issues.” They included sculptures, live performances by prison camp survivors, recorded sound, photographs, and actual artifacts of war on display, such as bombs. NBC broadcast speeches that were made as part of these events. OWI photographers made a photographic record of these exhibitions as well. Using previously unpublished photographs from the Library of Congress archives, this paper examines OWI photographs of “The Nature of the Enemy” exhibition that opened at Rockefeller Center on May 17, 1943. It analyzes the roles played by former FSA photographers such as Gordon Parks, Esther Bubley, Marjory Collins and Leo Rosten in creating and documenting these OWI exhibitions. I argue that the exhibition shows how hard the OWI photographic staff had to work during the war to “educate” the population to distinguish “the nature of the enemy” from the virtues of the “four freedoms,” so as to convince them to support the war.