See America

Presenting the visual culture of the United States and making it readable for an audience of French culture: these are the challenges that we are tackling America of images.

As cultural couriers and interpreters of civilization from the United States to France, François Brunet and a team of 22 academics review the images that counted in the creation and maintenance of the national community across the Atlantic. More than the United States, they deal with “ America “, This “ imaginary place, dissociated from geographical reality and known worldwide through images “. They aspire to give a French public the keys to reading and the references of a “ living culture, of which we often only have a fragmentary vision in France “.

A book-exhibition

Catalog of iconic images, panorama of the iconographic history of the United States, work with an encyclopedic and educational purpose, America of Images is all that. The 400 pages of the work include thematic articles grouped into six major chronological parts, each introduced by synthetic essays on the period. The first part deals with the colonial era, which saw “ the birth of national identity » (François Brunet) ; the second, from the end of the colonial period to the beginnings of the republic, shows how “ the image becomes Americanized » in the second half of XIX^e century (Géraldine Chouard). The third part, entitled “ America is modernizing », begins with the industrial revolution and ends in the 1930s (Didier Aubert). The fourth part deals with “ the age of propaganda » during which Hollywood and the state services under Roosevelt massively created and distributed images of the nation (Jean Kempf). The fifth part highlights the predominant role of the media in society in the 1960s-1990s (Anne Crémieux) and the last part focuses on “ questions of the present » concerning the status of the image and the political issues linked to it (François Brunet).

Six full-page illustration books as well as one or two-page freeze frames complete the set. In addition to the illustration notebooks, the numerous reproductions inserted in the articles (iconography: Sophie Dannenmüller) and the 25×29 format of the work relate it to the genre of the exhibition catalog, even if the exhibition in this case is the book itself.

Interpret the image and understand its social uses

The connection of “ the history of figurations and interpretations ” with “ the history of techniques and practices that bring images into existence in social life » is a constant in the work. Throughout the articles, the image takes shape in multiple ways: paintings, photographs, decorative arts, statuary of war memorials, photos, museum artifacts, advertisements, architecture, cinematographic images or posters are the vehicles of a visual vocabulary which underpins the national political culture. The portrait, for example, from painting to photography via the daguerreotype, is presented as the genre par excellence of a democratic culture where the social contract is embodied in men (François Brunet, chapter 3).

Another guiding thread of the work, new social uses, combined with the growing multiplication of images, are the subject of debates on the place of images in society. The status of the image in Puritan society is thus re-examined to do justice to the private uses of religious images, often obscured by Protestant distrust of images in places of worship (François Specq, chapter 1). The documentary reality of photography was called into question as early as the Civil War, when it turned out that photographers had moved the corpses of soldiers for the purposes of the image and were unscrupulous about their belonging, northern or southern depending on what they wanted to mean (William Gleeson and Véronique Ha Van).

These questions took shape well before Daniel Boorstin wrote a worried essay in 1961 on The Image, or what happened to the American dreamor before the trouble caused by the creation of virtual digital images. The relationship with national imagery is questioned by multiple iconographic diversions aimed in particular at denouncing the dominant racist evidence (Anne Crémieux) and by the “ culture wars » of the 1990s, during which the canonization of art was the subject of bitter controversy (Mark Meigs). The “ questions of the present » on what is commonly called the “ digital revolution » as well as on contemporary uses of the image.

These images that we cannot see

The articles and freeze frames offer a balanced treatment of film and television productions, photography and painting. In the background, museum images, posters, press illustrations and architecture are processed. Generally speaking, the work gives pride of place to the iconographic arts and gives its nobility to the image at the frontiers of art, in television and advertising productions in particular (Ariane Hudelet, Jennifer Donnely).

Perhaps because its authors thought America of images like the uncovering of a national iconographic canon, the social uses of ephemeral or illegal images in public space are not addressed. In the analysis and in the illustration plates, the different types of advertising images are also under-represented. Logos, in particular, could have been the subject of historical or semiotic developments.

Finally, if “ the parallel world of the series “, “ complex and seductive mirror of American society » (Ariane Hudelet) underlines an undeniable form of cultural influence of the United States throughout the world, other forms of cultural dissemination through images, just as massive but less legitimate, are not analyzed. Thus, a history of the erotic and pornographic image, of its inclusion in social uses, of the political issues of its liberalization, and of its contemporary economic weight would have been welcome in a work on the visual culture of the United States. It is true that the accompanying illustrations would have contrasted with the aesthetic concern given to the iconography of the volume. The work thus makes choices: it is mainly images that are legitimate from an artistic point of view and those which express a progressive or patriotic political ideology which are highlighted in the work.

National cultures, transnational developments

America of images elucidates for a French readership the iconography of the dominant culture of XXI^e century in the United States. By bringing us into the cultural universe of a national community, the authors, mainly of French culture, sometimes relay a reading of history imbued with American national issues, in which it is by example question of “ Civil war » rather than “ Civil War “.

This is the whole difficulty of the work of cultural transmitters, who without losing the benefit of their external point of view, must account for a culture by definition ethnocentric. This difficulty is at the heart of current questions about the writing of history in a globalized academic field.

Thus, the work should not lead the reader to overestimate the American specificity of the phenomena described, such as the creation of national symbols, the institutionalization of landscapes typical of the nation or even the aestheticization of the industrial revolution. To the bibliography mainly devoted to iconography in the United States, we could add works relating to the transnational construction of national visual repertoires. Benedict Anderson and Anne-Marie Thiesse, in particular, have highlighted the institutionalization of landscape in national iconographies through maps, pictorial representations and symbolizations. Nothing is more different, in short, and yet nothing is more similar than the work of a painter of the fjords of Norway, the Black Forest of Baden Württemberg or the meanders of the Hudson Valley.