American photographs in Europe

Abstract

This collection of essays explores how American photographs entered European culture. From the 1840s on, photographs contributed to stereotypes of the United States, interpreting American events and characteristic landscapes. This was a complex process, in which Europeans were intimately involved, both as photographers and as disseminators of American images. Photographs were always inflected during the process of cultural transmission. They were cropped, captioned, and positioned within new frames of reference. For example, New Deal photographs received an entirely new set of meanings in Nazi Germany. Likewise, in the contexts of world's fairs, mass distribution magazines, art exhibitions, advertising and immigration, American images played a central role in defining what was considered distinctive about the United States. This path-breaking work charts the contours of this area of intercultural communication for the first time and is arranged as a series of case studies within a chronological and theoretical framework provided by the editors.