Photography and American Coloniality: Eliot Elisofon in Africa, 1942-1972
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Photography and American Coloniality: Eliot Elisofon in Africa, 1942-1972
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628952889 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2017 |
| Series: | African Humanities and the Arts |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 337 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Photography And American Coloniality
Eliot Elisofon in Africa, 1942â"1972
By Raoul J. Granqvist
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2017 Raoul J. GranqvistAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62895-288-9
CHAPTER 1
En Route from Scandinavia to Africa, 1942–1944
On Becoming a Trickster with a Hungry Camera and a Loud Mouth
Eliot Elisofon's photographic map of World War II scenes is as far-reaching as his efforts to be a global photographer. As it happened, his first stop in October 1939 was my native country, Finland, where he was sent (accompanied by the legendary photojournalist Thérèse Bonney) by LIFE to cover the upcoming Olympic Games, but he found himself in the midst of frantic Finnish war preparations; his second stop was a seven-month assignment as a pool photographer (from October 1942 to May 1943) for the North West Africa Sea Frontier Command in Tunisia; the third was a commission to photograph the installation of pipelines to Alaska (for the Northwest Service Command) and covers his residence at arctic Aklavik on the west side of the Mackenzie Delta; and the fourth was his service as war correspondent and combat propagandist under Dwight Eisenhower's and the Allies' London-based Supreme Headquarters Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF). His stay in neutral Sweden and Stockholm would last from February to November 1944 and also involve a dramatic excursion to northern Finland (September–October) to document the expulsion of the Nazis from Finnish territory.
I have chosen to dwell upon Elisofon's Scandinavian sojourns as they were two substantial stopovers on his route to the Africa of my study. The time in Swedenwas different from the other war scenes he experienced. His time there offered a normalcy of sorts: he witnessed people — seemingly free — walking in the streets, flirting in restaurants, skiing, and debating. But Stockholm, Eliot's home base, was anything but an orderly Swedish city; it was the world's largest treasure trove for gossipmongers, diplomats with plans, and others just as dedicated to undermine the same — Nordic Casablanca. The palavers were not only about the ongoing war and what means were required to stop it, or Sweden's kissing in the dark with Nazi Germany, but also produced the formulations of conditions for peace to emerge and addressed the shaky future Sweden embraced. Alliances, large and small — transnational, idealistic, and political — were construed and dissolved. Hierarchies of power builders were created. By the time Elisofon entered this arena, the staff at the American legation had increased from four in 1940 to four hundred four years later. It is in this milieu that he developed his skills in calibrating his hand and eye, in sweet-talking with persuasive conviction, in taking individual risks also outside the trenches, in refining his American profile as "the world's best Life magazine journalist," and, as such, on occasions, bolstering arrogant national superiority, side by side with spates of aphoristic wit. In Scandinavia, he became the trickster with a hungry camera and a loud mouth.
Stockholm, the only free-talk marketplace in Europe, was a perfect site for imperial show-offs, as postcolonial Africa would also be. Yet the Swedes needed to dismantle their stereotype of the United States, in their turn, as a country of nylon socks and chewing-gum only, Eliot would have riposted. Not all winners, whether war-faring Americans or nonviolent Swedes, have won it all. The mediation by a trickster is full of loopholes.
Finland: Orientalism
Eliot Elisofon's very first foreign assignment for LIFE sent him to Finland, where he was going reluctantly, as he said, "to do tourist pix." Finland would host the Summer Olympics the following year, and the Americans needed to be informed. But the Finns would have to wait until 1952 before this could take place. "Was there a week when the war broke out, realized Finland would figure. Changed story to emphasize military aspects," Eliot wrote to his bosses in New York (HRC 2.20). Eliot was accompanied across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary by the already famous photojournalist Thérèse Bonney, who was forty-four years old (Eliot was twenty-eight). They were the first of the 266 accredited journalists from twenty-three countries to arrive in Finland. Bonney was an influential agent in the American intelligence service and was also writing articles about Finland for Collier's, for which Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, commander in chief of the Finnish troops during the three wars, rewarded her with a medallion of honor. She traced the Finnish contacts that were needed to produce the 1939 LIFE story, but the photography and the storyline that it contained were all Eliot's.
The photo essay title "Finland: Soviet Russia Crowds a Nation of Democrats" (LIFE, 30 October 1939, 69–76) recognized the two military combatants, Communist Russia and Democratic Finland, but hid the third, the righteous one, the United States, or expected magazine readers to take its presence as a given. Also at this stage, as the verb "crowd" implied, the Russian aggression and threats had not yet catapulted into brutal invasion, but it was close (which would bereave me of my father for five years). I have not yet found a LIFE story without the casting of "America" as the prime protagonist, so this one was not unique. It played out an Orientalist morality where Finland was a threshold, borderline figure, an aspiring fledgling in the Western democratic club, headed by the United States, whose duty it was, the essay intimated, to assist. The rhetorical appropriation of heroic Finland definitely had goodwill effects at the time (LIFE would have one section each week about Finland as long as the one hundred–day Winter War lasted), but its patronizing impact was to be more penetrating. It was along the thematic parameters of East and West, servitude and freedom, bad and good, Byzantine extravaganza and Christian liberalism that the visual material of a Western-biased morality was organized. Finland's paying off its war debts was lauded with benign pats on the head. With the country's problematic and murky alliance with the Germans, Elisofon's admiration for the dogged Finnish determination turned sour, and would not be rehabilitated by the Finns expulsion of the Nazis from Finnish territory in October 1944. The Finns were to remain an irresolute, threshold "race." But at this early stage (1939), he was all in favor of them/us.
The forty photographs dominate the eight-page essay, followed (in this order) by the captions, the titles, the subtitles, and the contextual narrative. The text (excluding the title texts) contains only one thousand words (in ten columns/132 rows); it is supplementary, a figurative guide only pointing to the visual material for clarification. The photos can be arranged into aerials, portraits, archetypal family pictures, and group pictures. Each of these categories or groups is meaning-bound; the individual photo within the group is a variance of the norm. The collage of the nine aerials sketched a topocentric narration of a young, independent (southern) Finland threatened by an imperial monster of aberrant culture and religion. The panoptical air-flight loop captured the president's summer residence Gullranda on the western coast (Naantali), the icon for Western democracy, contrasting it with its imaginative counterparts, the Orthodox Valamo (Valaam) monastery in the east and the Fort Slava ruins on the island of Kukouri (just outside the city of Kotka) in the southeast. Together with the vignette for the essay, the conventional aerial of the "land of thousands of islands," these images drew the geographical and ideological boundaries of the package called Finland (only half of the country). The remaining aerials closed in on the capital of Helsinki and its major historical attractions and administrative buildings completing the snapshot overview: the town hall, the Swedish legislature, Russian czar Alexander II's statue, the Great Church, and the Olympic Stadium. The next move was to fill the package with men of power — and one woman (Fanni Luukkonen, chief of the Lotta Svärd band) — all of them, the essay assured, were ready for the war and its sacrifices. The photo of Jean Sibelius with the caption ("who gave Finns an anthem in his tone poem Finlandia"), not taken by Elisofon, accorded smoothly with the elegiac, mournful sentiment of the photo essay.
The portraits of single military leaders in uniforms, the group pictures of veterans in strict military poses, World War I volunteer soldiers marching, young men swearing the oath of loyalty in the Lutheran church, men heating up in the sauna, and others doing gymnastics, keeping healthy, construe the concept of a pious, united, and decisive nation. The additional four collages of pictures reinforce this ethics; their metonymic rubrics only confirm: "Finns love flags," "Finns are religious," "Finns are clean," "Finns are honest." These are typical exotic clichés, visual or nonvisual, that Eliot could have found in any tourist brochure, in any travelogue about Finland, then, and even now. What is of interest for me (and for the thesis of the book) is the skill, and this essay is a prime example, with which Elisofon domesticated and imputed the-already-said/seen with the viewer's prejudices, desires, and expectations — of his specific time. Its blend of an accommodative narrative structure, its chauvinistic rhetoric, and its journalese foreshadow Eliot's conditional writing of Africa. Told as an orientalized simile of redemption and patriotism, the implications of which hardly any middle-class American LIFE reader would have missed, Eliot and the New York staff (and Bonney) had produced one of the magazine's most influential photo essays of the 1940s (he thought that it was his best prewar production) (LIFE, 13 April 1940, 13), as well as a problematic one.
Eliot's second trip to Finland (25 September–14 October 1944), during the last phase of the Finnish wars, bore little resemblance with the one five years earlier. The small group of international journalists (British, American, Swedish) he accompanied were sent out to report on how Finland handled the armistice agreement with Russia, and, in particular, the lease of the Porkkala region, only 19 km west of Helsinki (returned to Finland in 1956), where they were shipped for a day's visual observations. On their return to Helsinki, Eliot and his colleague John Scott persuaded the Finnish intelligence officer Heikki Kekoni to permit the group to travel to a newly formed front in the northern Baltic Gulf area where the Finns were landing matériel and soldiers in what was to be their very first confrontation to intern the German forces in the north in compliance with the Allied Control Commission's decision (Eliot rightly called it the "Russian" Commission: it consisted of two hundred Soviet and fifteen British members). Kekoni hardly had any problems with letting the journalists travel, since Finland sought eagerly to be recognized for its endeavor to clean up the North. The skirmishes that Eliot and his colleagues were to witness on 3 October in the Kemi-Tornio area were among the very first battles in what was to be called the Lapland War (ended in April 1945).
From what was planned to be a somber report about a particular instance (the evacuation of Porkkala) in wartime Finland, given this chance to travel, Eliot would broaden his photojournalistic focus to the theme of "a country at all odds arising from war" — in other words, to writing the sequential chapter of his 1939 article about the country preparing for it with such determination and energy. It is in this vein that he, on the one hand, took pictures of devastation and decay, of bombed bridges, of torn houses with sandbagged windows, of women wearing wooden-soled shoes with paper composition uppers, and men in full uniforms with rows of ribbons. On the other hand, he made ample but uninspired efforts to document a country returning to a normalcy, a country lacking the material prerequisites for it to develop. He visited a chemical factory whose staff were instructed to cultivate their own potatoes on rented land, and took an astounding picture of women queuing for potatoes handed out from a freight train wagon, both in Helsinki. He visited hospitals for evacuees and invalids in both Oulu and in Helsinki; he scanned a school for rehabilitating and teaching disabled ex-soldiers to accustom to new life activities — all these activities at a speed that left no room for either meditation or concentration. On his way back from the north he met Niilo Kanto, director of a paper mill in Kajaani (northeastern Finland) who told the story of the Finnish cellulose products emerging from the forest outside the mill into the world market. It is another moral tale of intrepidity and stamina about the small versus the big, the leitmotif of the former photo essay. So is also the aura that surrounds his second industrial project, a very brief call at (now) Ovako Imatra Steelworks, not far from the Russian border (which Eliot approached without permission and from which he was brusquely dispatched). The Allied Control Commission required the Finnish forces to demobilize while advocating, conflictingly, that the country throw out the Germans. Eliot encountered the two sides of this paradox during his two-week travel. He took snapshots of happy Finnish soldiers waving their demobilization documents on the way home; he ran into the less happy Russian prisoners and noted them with detachment. He did not interview Finnish soldiers, but he saw them in action, and cursed their commanders, high and low, for incompetence. Nor did he talk at any length with the many Karelian evacuees he met frequently and photographed. It was not prewar Finland, war-faring Finland, postwar Finland he was engaged in; it was he himself as a combatant American photographer that he focused on as his job.
On 3 October, the press corps were transported — again the initiative was Eliot's — at nighttime in a small open boat from Oulu to the port of Röyttä, a few kilometers south of the city of Tornio, from where they were taken to the Finnish-German front, a short distance farther south, midway between the two cities of Tornio and Kemi. It is as if the journalists and their host egged each other on. By this flanking maneuver by both sea and land, the press reached the military bull's-eye they were anxious to watch. Apart from Elisofon's increasing irritation with what he thought was negligent and inept Finnish command, his focus was on taking photos of Stuka bombs, advancing Finnish soldiers "dispersed over a large open area," and fallen or injured troops.
Three of the photographs and the comments he made about them were meant only for Wilson Hicks, photographic editor at LIFE. The first describes a pretty conventional use of a camera angle to achieve the effect he desires. "I walked around shooting the very bare looking chimneys and found several places where some contrasts helped out. One I framed against some very much alive birches, in others I used a white ruined church for contrast" (HRC 6.10, 4). Producing the second, he admitted that the same viewing (if not necessarily the same technique) had created ethical problems for him:
There was one dead German in a fat pasture fringed with spruce trees and cut by a split rail meandering its middle. Above the trees a beautiful cloud sat with fine shading and edges. I broke one of my rules and put a filter on my Rolleiflex to overemphasize the clouds and the landscape so as to make a greater contrast to the still figure stretched full length in the grass. (HRC 6.10, 6)
The third photo portrayed a wounded Finnish soldier carried into the theater on a litter made of birch logs and being nursed by a military doctor.
The medical captain of the battalion had a look and there was one moment when the captain laid his hand on the wounded leg and near his easy hand the soldier's tense hand made great contrast. It was a fine picture and was lucky enough to get it just that way. (HRC 6.10, 6)
In all the three montages, contrast was a decisive factor, both as an aesthetic factor and an ideological medium. The picture with the bare-looking chimneys may signify both sadness and hope. The smoke from the home or the factory reversed the freshness of birches and the whiteness of a church wall. That is contrast that any war is embedded in. In the next, Eliot's manipulation of the camera lens intensified the play of colors surrounding the corpse of the invader in his grassy lit de parade. It is as if the verdure of the Finnish spruce forest and a split rail had taken revenge. The visual sympathy rested outside the body. The professional malaise the photographer felt creating this picture was replaced by his feel-good for the next. The latter's narrative is impromptu, self-produced. These two pictures were about life and death. The one with the German was anchored to the lowest ladder in the hierarchy of political order and denied the right to Elisofon's caring hands and neutral eyes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Photography And American Coloniality by Raoul J. Granqvist. Copyright © 2017 Raoul J. Granqvist. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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