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Shooting from the Hip: Photography, Masculinity, and Postwar America

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With the close of World War II, the paradigmatic masculine, myth-like image of the soldier could no longer be sustained. Returning to the domestic society with their memories of the realities of war, as well as knowledge of their own fears, conflicts, and roles in the carnage, the legions of men also returned to a society which had worked admirably without them in maintaining order, demonstrating patriotism, and producing prodigious amounts of war supplies and consumer goods. The patriarchal "fictions" about men were in shambles. This work "explores the way photography functioned within the postwar restructuring of the dominant fiction." Photography accomplished this by presenting images of men which reestablished them at the head of the social structure in roles that were desirable and beneficial. No longer seen by themselves or those who remained on the "home front," especially women, as saving the society, the men came to be seen by themselves and women in respectable and romantic ways reflecting American ideals of individual worth and ability, mastery of one's own situation and destiny, and autonomy. The five main types of images were "breadwinner, warrior, tough guy, playboy, and rebel." Vettel-Becker, professor of art history at Montana State U.-Billings, writes a cultural study of how each of these was created by media photography, and each image's part in making male ego whole and restoring male superiority in postwar American society. One chapter, "Female Body," showing a few photos of naked women, looks at how the eroticized image of women worked so men could regain the position they had lost due to the "historical trauma" they suffered from World War II.