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Shooting from the Hip. Photography, Masculinity, and Postwar America

by Patricia Vettel-Becker
The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 2005
199 pp., 36 b/w illus. Paper,$19.95
ISBN: 0-8166-4301-6.

Reviewed by Jan Baetens

jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be

Sometimes, the best books are the simplest ones, and Patricia Vettel-Becker’s study on the remasculinization of photography in the postwar years (from 1945 till the late fifties, when the dominant social role of photography is once and for all taken over by the new medium of television) is a perfect illustration of this virtue. Starting from the idea that masculinity is in crisis in the immediate postwar years, first because of the difficult reintegration of the often very unheroic veterans to their work and home place, second because of the even more difficult reduction of the responsibilities and independence of the often very heroic women who had been obliged to take their men’s places during the war, Patricia Vettel-Becker analyzes the transformations in the field of photography as one of the many strategies developed by a male dominated culture to reinforce or re-establish traditional roles of masculinity, and to remasculinize society as a whole. The very strength of this wonderfully written book (and please note that this is not just the usual compliment the reviewer gives to a book that pleased him) is that it sticks to this one single hypothesis or perspective, while managing to reinterpret and to restructure completely a very broad field (and even two, since Patricia Vettel-Becker does not only provide a new analysis of postwar photography in America, she also offers new insights in the cultural theory of that place and those times by connecting photography to several other fields such as, for instance, cinema (film noir), politics (McCarthy), and the art and gender debate (in this sense, it might appear very fruitful to establish a relationship between this book and Andreas Huyssen’s theory on the feminization of lower arts during the pop era in the early sixties).

What makes this book not only so attractive, but also so dramatically convincing is twofold. First, there is, of course, the newness of its basic stance, which helps to produce a new vision of what we thought we knew almost by heart. The rereading of Robert Frank’s The Americans, a book that Patricia Vettel-Becker juxtaposes with Bruce Davidson’s work on a Brooklyn gang, is a paramount example of the very innovative character of this study. But the same remark can be made for the playmate and sports photography of the fifties, which the author rereads by … putting them together.

Second, there is the broadness of the author’s scope. Even more eye-opening than the analysis of Robert Frank, William Klein, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Weegee, and many, many others (some of them unknown to a modern audience, which is also a great advantage and pleasure too), is the author’s study of the different genres that organized the work of photographers in those years as well as her very clear and intelligent rereading of the institutional context of the ways pictures were shown, in magazines, in books, in museums Shooting from the Hip, does not just focus on some isolated authors or some lesser known practices, it really tackles the whole field, all the genres, and almost all the great photographers of that period. In each case, Patricia Vettel-Becker manages to put forward the gender aspect of a work, a genre, a context, both at the level of the pictures themselves (the author is a wonderful close reader) and at that of the framing discourse and the cultural practices surrounding and including photography. Patricia Vettel-Becker is able to explain major shifts in photography, such as for instance the transition from prewar documentary photography to postwar magazine street photography. Gender, and the author is, as far as I know, the very first to stress this point, plays here a crucial role: in postwar years, documentary photography is being considered ‘feminine’ for its appeal to emotion and its possible link to suspect ideologies (in the McCarthy era, collaboration with the enemy was a form of surrendering of ‘weak’ and ‘soft’ bodies to foreign seduction), whereas the depoliticized street photography enabled the photographer to present his work in terms of battle, struggle, and conquest. Moreover, the emergence of photojournalism is linked with gender form other viewpoints too. Patricia Vettel-Becker studies very convincingly the gendered structure of power relationships within the world of photojournalism (with the hypermasculine photographer feeling diminished by the script of the——mostly feminine——picture editor or researcher, both being under the final supervision of the——systematically masculine——editor in chief). She also emphasizes the tension between the art world (which was considered feminine) and that of the harsh press or product photography (which enabled the male photographer to enact his role of breadwinner and independent free-lancer), a tension visible in the policy of the MOMA (it has not been stressed enough, and Patricia Vettel-Becker does it wonderfully) that "The Family of Man" is also, and maybe in the first place, a reaction against fine arts photography, or in the choice made by some photographers of the book as a new medium for the exhibition of their work (to publish in a book meant to ignore the feminized museum and art world, among other things).

In short, a refreshing and very important book. A major contribution also to the use of gender theory of photography, bringing to the fore a feminist rereading of the canon as well as the mainstream of a period, instead of focusing on ‘repressed’ authors and practices or on their rediscovery.

 

 




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