Trophy Photographs in WWII. An Interdisciplinary and Transnational Debate

TROPHY PHOTOGRAPHS in WWII
An Interdisciplinary and Transnational Debate

^{Ci-contre : 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}

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. Trophy photographs, we argue, reveal the highly gendered and colonizing aspects of war, from intimate perspectives of excessive violence to group dynamics and beyond.

Funded by the Scientific Advisory Board at Sciences Po Paris and the Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur, this collaborative and interdisciplinary project explores performative images of victory and conquest as a distinct genre and as objects that circulate in time and space. Drawing upon public archives and private collections, we probe what the private photographs of ordinary soldiers deployed in Europe and the Pacific in World War II tell us about gender, race, sexuality, and war.

Our group, composed of artists, collectors, and scholars from across disciplines and national borders, interrogates the motives and mindsets behind the soldiers’ triumphant postures and what the soldiers perceived as harmless pranks in front of the camera. Further, we investigate what we can glean about the impulse to fight or kill from the ways how "ordinary" soldiers portray themselves and circulate with photographs. Finally, we examine the ways that the contemporaneous political systems and associated militaries, both Allied and Axis, informed and affected trophy photographs captured by soldiers.

A key outcome of our interdisciplinary collaborative work will be a photo textbook that analyses trophy photographs taken during WWII as objects, sources, and media for the study of warfare and military masculinities. In Spector Books, we have found a publishing partner that engages in an innovative book production process that blends scholarly inquiry and book design. More than any other genre, trophy photographs call for a critical, truly interdisciplinary approach.

• Project Coordination: Elissa Mailänder (Sciences Po, Centre d'histoire) and Tom Streuber (TD&H GmbH)
• [2021-2024]

TEAM

Petra Bopp (PhD) is a freelance art historian and curator who lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin. Since 2013, she has been a fellow at the research group BildEvidenz, Geschichte und Ästhetik at the Institute of Art History at the Freie Universität Berlin. Dr. Bopp has curated many exhibitions and published extensively on the private photography of Wehrmacht soldiers in WWII. This includes, among other things, the coordination of the groundbreaking exhibit Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941-1944 [War of Extermination: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941-1944] by the Hamburg Institute of Social Research (1995-2001). In 2009, she curated the exhibition Fremde im Visier. Fotoalben aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg [Focus on Strangers: Photo Albums of World War II], shown in Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria. Her current research project looks at Counterpoints: Private War Pictures Taken in Europe from 1939 to 1948.

Martin Dammann is an artist and collector. For more than 20 years he has worked on vernacular war photography - in his artistic practice, but also as a photo scout for the private, London-based Archive of Modern Conflict. His expertise comes from the "grassroots," that is, through the study of countless photo albums and notes of soldiers. He is the author of Soldier Studies - Crossdresser in the Wehrmacht, published by Hatje Cantz in 2018.

Margaret Hillenbrand is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Her teaching and publications focus on literary and visual culture in twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan. Her most recent book, Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China, appeared with Duke University Press in Spring 2020. It explores the role played by remediations of historical photographs in China’s processing of its troubled twentieth-century past.

Marianne Ingleby is an Amsterdam-based artist born in Cambridge, UK. She studied journalism and photography and holds a Master's degree in American Studies. In her MA thesis “Watchdog on a Leash,” Ingleby examined The New York Times and The Washington Post's reporting preceding the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Her current project, Operation Detachment, explores the uncensored war archive of her grandfather, who was a US Army photographer in Japan during World War II. As an artist, she reconstructs the story that his archive tells and in turn deepens our understanding of war. As a photographer, she aspires to be as bold as her grandfather and capture the unpolished truth. Ingleby’s work has been nominated for the Rabobank Portrait Talent Award, organized by the Dutch National Portrait Gallery, as well as the Olympus Young Talent Award, and has been exhibited in the Grote Kerk at Naarden Fotofestival.

Iain Johnston-White (PhD) is a historian of the British Empire and war in the twentieth century. Having earned a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge in 2014, he currently works as an Education Advisor at University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and as an Online Tutor in History at the University of Oxford. He has previously researched the wartime participation of the British ‘dominions’, authoring The British Commonwealth and Victory in the Second World War with Palgrave McMillan in 2017. Dr. Johnston-White’s latest book, co-edited with Professor Michael Cullinane and published in 2022, is a collection of oral history testimonies of British veterans who fought in the Korean War. 

Daniel H. Magilow is Full Professor of German in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research centers on photography and film and their intersections with Holocaust Studies, Weimar Germany, and postwar memory. He is the author, co-author, editor, or translator of five books, most recently the second edition of Holocaust Representations in History: An Introduction (co-authored with Lisa Silverman, 2019).

Elissa Mailänder is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Sciences Po Paris. Her teaching and research focus on the history of everyday life, gender, violence, and sexuality. She has published extensively on perpetrator history and the structures, mechanisms, and dynamics of violence in Nazi Germany. Her most recent scholarship includes the monograph Amour, mariage, sexualité. Une histoire intime du nazisme, 1930-1950 [Love, Marriage, Sexuality. An Intimate History of Nazi Germany], Paris, Seuil, 2021, and the articles “Cross-dressing and the Violence of Male Intimacy in Third Reich Photography,” co-authored with Jennifer Evans, and “Making Sense of a Rape Photograph: Sexual Violence as Social Performance on the Eastern Front, 1939-1944.”

Regina Mühlhäuser (PhD) is an historian and Senior Researcher at the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Research and Culture. She is also an Associate at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research in Germany and a coordinator of the international research group “Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict.” Dr. Mühlhäuser’s work centers on violence, gender, and sexuality in armed conflict. Her current project explores practices and narratives of British soldiers in World War II in Europe and Asia. She is the co-editor of In Plain Sight: Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict, published by Gaby Zipfel, Regina Mühlhäuser, and Kirsten Campbell in 2019. The English version of Dr. Mühlhäuser’s book Sex and the Nazi Soldier. Violent, Commercial and Consensual Encounters of German men during the War in the Soviet Union, appeared with Edinburgh UP in fall 2021.

Malu Mühmer has an undergraduate degree from Science Po followed by a M.A. in Peace and Security Studies from the 'Institute of Peace Research and Security Policy' at the University of Hamburg. During her studies, Ms. Mühmer’s focus was on the economics of war, the interplay between natural science and war, as well as aspects of International Law and International Relations in the context of security. She joined the project as a research assistant in 2020 and has been researching the internal dynamics of the South African forces during WWII. Currently, she is working at PwC as an Associate for public sector consulting in the governance and defence sector.

Ulrich Prehn (PhD) is a Berlin-based historian and curator who currently works in the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. From 2009 to 2015, he was the coordinator of the research project “Photography under National Socialism: Everyday Imagery of Community Bonding and Social Exclusion, 1933–1945” at Berlin’s Humboldt University. Dr. Prehn is currently working on a book that examines photographs of the “working world” in Germany from the 1920s to 1945. Together with Linda Conze and Michael Wildt, he co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Modern European History on “Photography and Dictatorships in the Twentieth Century.”

Mary Louise Roberts is the WARF Distinguished Lucie Aubrac and Plaenert-Bascom Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Roberts has received an impressive body of awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has also held grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council. Professor Roberts is the author of D-Day Through French Eyes (2014) and What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II (2013). Her most recent book, Sheer Misery: Soldiers at War, 1943-1945,appeared with the University of Chicago Press in 2021.

Sven Saaler is Professor of Modern Japanese History at Sophia University in Tokyo. After earning a PhD in Japanese Studies and history from the Rhenish Friedrich-Wilhelms-University Bonn, he held positions at the Philipps-University Marburg, the German Institute for Japanese Studies, and the University of Tokyo. Professor Saaler is the author of the monographs Politics, Memory, and Public Opinion (2005) and Men in Metal (2018), as well as co-author/co-editor of Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History (2007), The Power of Memory in Modern Japan (2008), Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History (2011), and the Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History (2018).

Tom Streuber is an author and filmmaker who writes and produces documentaries and feature films such as the award-winning productions Phase II (Best Newcomer 2002, Cinéma du Réel, Paris), Fashion Victims (Max Ophüls Price, Best Screenplay 2007), Mercy (Berlinale Competition 2012), Theatre Without Audience (Volksbühne Berlin 2015), and Richard the Stork (Berlinale 2017, worldwide release). The focus of his work is on story development, exploring the role of the observer and creator of all types of media.

Yuki Tanaka is Emeritus Research Professor of History at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, Hiroshima City University, Japan. In 2008, he was a visiting professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the Sir Ninian Stephen Visiting Scholar at the Law School, Melbourne University. Professor Tanaka specializes in the history of Japanese war crimes during World War II as well as the aerial bombing of Japanese cities conducted by the U.S. His publications include the monographs Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation (Routledge, 2002) and Entwined Atrocities. New Insights into the U.S.-Japan Alliance (Peter Lang, 2023.

Jan Wenzel is a writer, publisher, and the co-founder, together with Markus Dreßen and Anne König, of the Leipzig-based Spector Books, which publishes books at the intersection of art, theory, and design. As an author and editor, Wenzel regularly publishes the section “The Revolving Bookshelf” in the magazine Camera Austria, which deals with innovative forms of photobooks. His artistic work on photo booth shots has been exhibited at the Museum Ludwig Köln, the Musée de l'Elysée Lausanne, the Victoria and Albert Museum London, and the Folkwang Museum Essen. In 2016, Mr. Wenzel and Anne König curated the photo festival f/stop in Leipzig

Jialin Christina Wu is Associate Professor in Contemporary Asian History at the Université Paris I - Panthéon-Sorbonne. She is a historian of empires, colonialism, and post-colonialism. Professor Wu’s research focuses on the intersections and circulations of ideas on gender, childhood, and youth with a regional focus on East and Southeast Asia. Her first book, titled Scouts in British Malaya: A Cultural History of Globalisation (in French), is currently under contract with the Presses de Sciences Po (forthcoming). Recent publications include: “Disciplining Native Masculinities: Colonial Violence in Malaya, ‘Land of the Pirate and the Amok’,” in the book Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018).