Above : Private Sam Miller of Pennsylvania holds a photograph of a Japanese woman, found in a Japanese dugout when US forces landed on Wakde Island.
Photographer: Jim Fitzpatrick, 26 May 1944.
https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C239703

Trophy Photographs in WWII
An Interdisciplinary and Transnational Debate

Project

Collaborative and Interdisciplinary project funded by the Scientific Advisory Board at Sciences Po and the Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur.

Since the invention of the photographic camera, combatants have captured their experiences of war in images. During the Second World War in particular, amateur photography by soldiers became a social phenomenon and mass medium. Equipped with fast-shutter, affordable 35mm cameras, Axis and Allied servicemen documented their wartime activities extensively, in turn leaving behind a gigantic, private—and largely underexplored— archive that poses multiple epistemological and ethical challenges. In innumerable photographs, soldiers visually celebrated their victories over an enemy or conquered population; common pictorial tropes included posing next to an opponent’s tank or with foreign women, fixating on dead bodies, and mocking the enemy.

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News

• June 8-10, 2023 - Workshop in Berlin, Ufer Studios (travail collaboratif)
• February 17, 2023 - Nuffield College / History Faculty's OxPo Exchange / Maison française d'Oxford / Sciences Po, CHSP
  How Historians work with visual sources? History as an Interdisciplinary Space (PDF, 790 Ko)
• February 8, 2022 -  Max-Planck-Institüt für Bildungforschung
  Got a light ? Soldiers, Cigarettes, and the Semantics of Wartime photography

Rivers on the move

June 1-2, 2023

On June 1-2, 2023, the Emergences project SHIFTING SHORES will hold its final workshop at Brown University, United States. Born from a collaboration of Giacomo Parrinello (Sciences Po, CHSP) with Bathsheba Demuth and Larry Smith from Brown University and Mark Healey from the University of Connecticut, the workshop will gather scholars from history, anthropology, landscape architecture, geography, hydrology, fluvial geomorphology and sedimentology to discuss the multifaceted relationship between the natural dynamism of rivers and deltas and social, economic, and political change with case studies covering rivers in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Twenty-first century riverine and coastal vulnerabilities often emerge from past efforts to make amphibious zones fully terrestrial—to settle, confine, and control hydrological processes.The workshop will investigate why and how people have attempted to fix or settle amphibious and shifting riverine landscapes, the consequences for rivers’ forms and behavior, and how such past human-river interactions influence contemporary life. The participants will work together on an edited collection that will present the variety of approaches and case studies to understand the history of “rivers on the move” in well-researched but accessible essays.

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