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PHOTOGRAPHIC DIPLOMACY IN THE POSTWAR WORLD: UNESCO AND THE CONCEPTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY AS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE, 1946–1956*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2015

TOM ALLBESON
TOM ALLBESON*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Nottingham E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

In the postwar decade, UNESCO aimed to create an international public sphere to secure peace. The organization made extensive use of photographs to do so, including the photographic archive of works of art and photojournalism from the ruined cities of Europe. However, photography was not simply a transparent medium for communicating internationalist ideals; it was a formative influence in shaping UNESCO's effort to build “peace in the minds of men”. This essay analyses the conception of photography as a universal language articulated in UNESCO-sponsored forums, the use of photography in UNESCO publications concerning human rights and educational reconstruction, and the internationalist ideals of world culture and world citizenship relevant to UNESCO's early work. Analysis reveals that UNESCO's use of photography was less the valuable deployment of a universal language suited to an internationalist agenda than it was the universalizing of certain cultural values in pursuit of the organization's utopian vision.

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Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , August 2015 , pp. 383 - 415
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the Arts & Humanities Research Council (UK) and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (University of Edinburgh) for the grants which facilitated this research. I am also grateful to the Centre for Advanced Studies (University of Nottingham) for the contribution towards the cost of securing permissions to reproduce the photographs included here. I am very grateful also to the anonymous reviewers of this essay for their insightful and constructive commentaries.

References

1 “La communauté humaine: Album spécial du 10e anniversaire des Nations unies”, Photo-Monde, 49–50 (1955), 6.

2 In a report to the General Conference of 1956, the dates were given as 4 to 16 May 1955. “Report of the Director-General on the Activities of the Organization in 1955” (1956), 100, at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0016/001608/160875eb.pdf, accessed 27 May 2013. The title given to the event in this official document was “The Role of Visual Aids in Modern Civilisation”. It was reported in the French media. “Les rencontres international sûr le rôle de l’image dans le civilisation contemporaine et la création d’un centre international de la photographie (fixe et animée)”, Photo-Monde, 47–8 (1955), 86–90.

3 UNESCO, “Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation” (1945), 7, at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001337/133729e.pdf, accessed 27 July 2013.

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10 Heute exemplifies the transnational history of the photo-magazine: “If the Berliner Illustrirte was once the model for Life, Life now became the model for Heute”. von Dewitz, Bodo and Lebeck, Robert, eds., Kiosk: Eine Geschichte der Fotoreportage, 1839–1973 (Göttingen, 2001), 292Google Scholar. See also Rolleston, James, “After Zero Hour: The Visual Texts of Post-War Germany”, South Atlantic Review, 64 (1999), 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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16 “UNESCO World Review”, for example, was a radio programme produced in English, French and Spanish, broadcast in forty countries by 1951. Besterman, Theodore, UNESCO: Peace in the Minds of Men (London, 1951), 89Google Scholar. By 1955, however, it had been subsumed into UNESCO's regular publication of press releases, UNESCO Features—an initiative which distributed 37,000 photographs to the press that year. Fernando Valderrama, A History of UNESCO (Paris, 1995), 107.

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18 While Courier did not replicate circulation figures of these titles, the new format produced a marked increase. By October 1955, the magazine was on sale in a hundred countries with a total circulation of 21,000—up from 8,000 in 1953. By December 1956, Courier had a circulation of over 70,000. “The UNESCO Courier: Item 8.4.5 of Provisional Agenda [for 8th UNESCO General Conference]”, 6 October 1954, at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0016/001607/160798eb.pdf, accessed 27 May 2013; Laves and Thomson, 118.

19 UNESCO Courier, 1 (1954), 2. The photo-magazines of the period likewise offered readers the world through the medium of photography, as articulated in their titles and strap lines. For instance, in France there was Point de vue—Images du monde (1945–), while in West Germany readers of Quick (1948–92) were told the world belonged to them (“Dem Quick-Leser gehört die Welt”).

20 For a discussion of the conception of photography as a universal language which also addresses its relevance prior to the mid-twentieth century see Sekula, Allan, “The Traffic Photographs”, Art Journal, 1 (1981), 15–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Discussing photo-magazines, Hall distinguished between “image-over-text” and “text-over-image” formats. Hall, Stuart, “The Social Eye of Picture Post”, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 2 (1972), 71–120Google Scholar.

22 Sandeen, Eric J., Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque, 1995), 85Google Scholar. See also Gresh, Kristen, “The European Roots of The Family of Man”, History of Photography, 29 (2005), 331–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Precursors and contemporary examples include “People are People the World Over”, a series of photo-stories by Magnum photographers which first appeared in the American Ladies Home Journal in issue 65, May 1948; the first Magnum exhibition, Gesicht der Zeit, which toured five Austrian cities in 1955–6; and We the People, a photographic exhibition hosted in San Francisco in 1955 to mark the tenth anniversary of the UN Charter. In 2003, Steichen's exhibition was added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, a list of archives and documentation considered of worldwide significance. The nomination form describes the exhibition (somewhat contradictorily) as “as the epitome of post-war humanist photography” and “unique of its kind”. Jean Back, “Memory of the World Register Nomination Proposal” (undated), at www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/CI/pdf/mow/nomination_forms/Family%20of%20Man%20Nomination%20Form.pdf, accessed 27 March 2014.

24 Barthes, Roland, “The Great Family of Man”, in Barthes, Mythologies (London, 1973), 100–2, 101Google Scholar.

25 “Une des marques de notre époque, c’est cette sorte de raz de marée qui déferle sur l’humanité . . . Ce nouveau monde d’images a ceci de particulier qu’il n’est plus un reflet de l’esprit. Il est une sorte d’effraction de l’univers faite avant que nous ayons pu penser à ce que cette effraction va nous donner.” Chamson, André, “Langage et images”, in La culture est-elle en péril? Débat sur ses moyens de diffusion: presse, cinéma, radio, télévision, Rencontres internationales de Genève, 10 (Neuchâtel, 1955), 79–101, 83, 92Google Scholar.

26 Chamson's commentary was mentioned in an editorial discussing The Family of Man. The editor notes Chamson's strident commentary, only to follow it with purportedly undeniable platitudes: “But even the severest critics do not seek to deny that photography has helped to enrich our lives, that it has given us a new vision of the world, and that it speaks a universal language”. UNESCO Courier, 2 (1956), 3.

27 Museum of Modern Art, The Family of Man (New York, 1955), 4.

28 The conclusions were published in UNESCO, Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations (London, 1949).

29 Material relating to the planning of this exhibition is held by the UNESCO Archives, Paris (e.g. UNESCO/MC/Droits de l’homme/48 to /50, “Exposition droits de l’homme, Musée Galliera”). See also The Human Rights Exhibition Project, at www.exhibithumanrights.org, accessed 9 September 2014. This research and curatorial initiative examining UNESCO's 1949 exhibition and subsequent publication was founded in 2013 at Columbia University by Katrine Bregengaard and Eva Prag.

30 UNESCO, Human Rights Exhibition Album (Paris, 1950), emphasis in the original.

31 The logo was designed soon after the establishment of the organization and first appeared on the cover of UNESCO, Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Newsletter, 8–9 (1947).

32 United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, Population Estimates and Projections Section, “World Urbanization Prospects, the 2011 Revision”, at http://esa.un.org/unup/CD-ROM/Urban-Rural-Population.htm, accessed 27 May 2013.

33 Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, “Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights”, in Hoffman, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2011), 1–26, 15Google Scholar.

34 While The Family of Man catalogue ends with an image of the UN debating chamber, the original exhibition finished with a backlit, wall-to-ceiling colour transparency of a mushroom cloud.

35 The editor-in-chief of Penguin Books applauded the original exhibition for demonstrating “how lucidly and dramatically the story of mankind can be made visible and significant”. Williams, W. E., “UNESCO portrays history of human rights”, Museum, 4 (1949), 201–5, 202Google Scholar.

36 Malraux, André, “Museum without Walls”, in Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Princeton, 1978), 13–127Google Scholar.

37 Ibid., 30.

38 Ibid., 46.

39 Finkielkraut, Alain, The Undoing of Thought, trans. Dennis O’Keeffe (London, 1988), 73–4Google Scholar. Filmmakers Chris Marker and Alain Resnais lamented the same issue in Les statues meurent aussi (1953); see Marker, Chris, “The Statues Also Die”, trans. Lauren Ashby, Art in Translation, 5 (2013), 429–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Arendt, Hannah, “The Crisis of Culture: Its Social and Political Significance”, in Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (London, 1961), 197–226, 207Google Scholar.

41 Ibid., 211.

42 These speeches were published in Huxley, Julian and Bodet, Jaime Torres, This Is Our Power (Zurich, 1949)Google Scholar.

43 Huxley's phrase (ibid., 10) was a reference to an idea promoted in wartime by American Wendell Willkie who—arguing against isolationism—advocated an internationalist agenda by taking a round-the-world trip meeting leaders and citizens in Allied countries: “Continents and oceans are plainly only parts of a whole, seen as I have seen them, from the air. England and America are parts; Russia and China, Egypt, Syria and Turkey, Iraq and Iran are also parts. And it is inescapable that there can be no peace for any part of the world unless the foundations of peace are made secure through all parts of the world.” Willkie, Wendell L., One World (London, 1943), 166Google Scholar.

44 Huxley and Torres Bodet, This Is Our Power, 9.

45 Ibid., 13, 16.

46 Ibid., 17.

47 Besterman, UNESCO: Peace in the Minds of Men, 76.

48 Zahra, Tara, “‘A Human Treasure’: Europe's Displaced Children between Nationalism and Internationalism”, Past and Present, 210 (suppl. 6) (2011), 332–50, 332CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Seymour, David, Children of Europe (Paris, 1949)Google Scholar. The three-month shooting trip to Italy, Austria, Greece, Hungary and Poland resulted in 257 rolls of exposed film. Naggar, Carole, “Lives of Chim”, in Young, Cynthia, ed., We Went Back: Photographs from Europe, 1933–1956 by Chim (New York, 2013), 9–29, 21Google Scholar. The project was announced in UNESCO Courier, 4 (1948), 3. It is likely this photo-book was commissioned by John Grierson, director of mass communication at UNESCO from February 1947 to April 1948.

50 In his history of UNESCO published in 1951, Theodore Besterman noted that 10,000 copies of Children of Europe had already been printed and distributed (Besterman, UNESCO: Peace in the Minds of Men, 79). His volume was also illustrated with Seymour's images.

51 Twenty-three sets of images depicting the situation of child war victims were produced for exhibition and circulated internationally in 1949. Valderrama, A History of UNESCO, 55. Given the date and the extensive use made by UNESCO of Seymour's images in extant publications, it is probable they were included in this exhibition.

52 Seymour, Children of Europe, 5–12.

53 Adverts for the book in Impetus, the UNESCO newsletter on reconstruction, make clear its function as a fundraising tool.

54 Kenworthy, Leonard S., “A World Citizen” (reproduced from Education Digest), UNESCO Courier, 4 (1948), 4Google Scholar.

55 “Enfants d’aujhourd’hui . . . Hommes de demain”, Photo-Monde, 51–2 (1956). Featuring photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marc Riboud and others, it had a trilingual preface in French, English and Spanish. The English-language title is the official translation as noted in UNESCO publicity material of the time (“To-day's Children . . . To-morrow's Citizens”, UNESCO Features, 24 Dec. 1956, 2).

56 UNESCO Courier, 12 (1956). Articles in this edition cover the issue of youth and education in detail, drawing on the World Survey of Education published by UNESCO in 1955.

57 The first image of the Human Rights Exhibition Album is similar, presenting a god's-eye view of Earth and replicating an original installation in the Musée Galliéra exhibition in which a globe was suspended in a chamber at eye level. The photograph and the visual device both enacted the one-world view mooted by Willkie and espoused by Huxley (see n. 43 above).

58 “These Are Children of Europe”, UNESCO Courier, 2 (1949), 6–9.

59 Seymour's photographs continued to be used in UNESCO publications in the following two decades, often without attribution or detailed captions. These images also appeared in the press (e.g. “Children of Europe”, Life, 27 December 1948, 13–19; “Sinistrati—Verlorene und vergessene Kinder Europas”, Heute, 16 February 1949, 9–19; “The New Generation”, Illustrated, 12 March 1949, 1–7). When a number of them were reproduced in The Family of Man, they were credited to “David Seymour—Magnum, UNESCO”. They were also reproduced in the press following Seymour's death in 1956 and exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago (Chim's Children, 15 April to 1 July 1957).

60 UNESCO, UNESCO: A World Programme (Paris, 1949), 17.

61 Cited by Hoggart, Richard, An Idea and Its Servants: UNESCO from Within (London, 1978), 59–60Google Scholar.

62 Morgenthau, Hans, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York, 1993), 353Google Scholar.

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