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