Seeing the World and Translating its Looks: Jewish Photographers in Early Discourses of Cold War Globalism

Seeing countries in the Global South for their respective political questions and not as revenues of ethnographic type photography emerged as a new trend in the early 1930s, changing the genre of travel photography. Photographers embarking on trips to Africa, Asia or South America saw themselves as journalists, enlightening the world about transformations and social conflicts. The kind of images they created paved the ways for early debates on globalism and global connectivity. While ostensibly interrupted by World War II, Jewish stories of displacement and statelessness shaped this kind of photography during the 1930s and 1940s and set new paradigms for Western public diplomacy strategies after World War II. This paper traces the paths of Jewish photographers through episodes of statelessness and immigration in which they continued to take photographs and share them with the world via newspapers and photobooks. It asks how these travelers referenced contacts with local political movements in their works, how they perceived their own presences in these countries in relation to their subjects and how these presences shaped their political thinking. It argues that the experience of exclusion influenced the photographers’ views in a way that had them coin Western ways of seeing anti-colonial contexts for decades to come. Their photography endowed them with the knowledge of contexts that were still largely unknown to audiences in the West. As such their perspectives granted them the agency of experts which shaped their role and standing as international journalists. By illuminating the Jewish photographers’ judgments of appropriation or distancing as transnational processes of learning and instructing their audiences this paper offers new access points to the Jewish history of forced migration, the history of interethnic encounters both in the West and the Global South as well as new approaches to connections between nationalism and anti-colonialism.