Shooting from the Hip: Photography, Masculinity, and Postwar America (review)

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 1950s, 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. The author starts from the idea that masculinity was 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, and 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 at home during the war. 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 her) 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 not only provides a new analysis of postwar photography in America, but 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 1960s).

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 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 1950s, which the author rereads by putting the two together.

Second, there is the broadness of the author's scope. Even more eye-opening than Vettel-Becker's analysis of Robert Frank, William Klein, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Weegee and many others (some of them unknown to a modern audience, which is both a great advantage and a great pleasure) 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, 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. Vettel-Becker is able to explain major shifts in photography, such as 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 was considered "feminine" for its appeal to emotion and its possible link to suspect ideologies...