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An inside look at the promises, pressures, and paradoxes of American military life in Cold War Germany.

Army life has always been known as a life of sacrifice, challenge, and frustration, yet one filled also with deep satisfactions. This is so for the soldiers’ families as much as for the soldiers themselves. Over the years, military and civilian leaders of the US Army have tried to reduce the hardships of military life by creating an array of community services designed to provide social support for soldiers and families and help them live satisfying lives in military communities.

Unfortunately, this effort has not been particularly successful, and frustration, dissatisfaction, and alienation persist among soldiers and family member in the US Army communities in Germany. Discontent continues because the underlying sources of alienation in the Army and among its families are highly complex, poorly understood, and therefore hardly addressed by the Army’s quality-of-life programs that are intended to make soldier and family life more bearable.

In Army of Hope, Army of Alienation: Culture and Contradiction in the American Army Communities of Cold War Germany, the author seeks to penetrate the logic, social structure, and daily practice of life in the American military communities that lay scattered along the frontier between East and West Germany during the final years of the Cold War. In coming to understand the life and thought of these American soldiers and families, ordinary American citizens can learn much about their military forces and about their own society and culture. In addition, a greater understanding about how people work and live around an institution that is at once so important and yet tasked with a mission so different from that of ordinary pursuits can stimulate social scientists and concerned citizens to think differently about culture, society, and behavior in general.
 

Exposing the politics of seeing: how documentary photographs confront inequality and reshape public understanding.

In Rhetorical Exposures, Christopher Carter explores social documentary photography from the nineteenth century to the present in order to illuminate the political dimensions and consequences of photographs taken and selected to highlight social injustice. Documentary photography aims to capture the material reality of life. Carter demonstrates how the creation and display of documentary photographs—often now called “imagetexts”—both invite analysis and raise persistent questions about the political and social causes for the bleak scenes of poverty and distress captured on film.

Carter’s carefully reasoned monograph examines both formal qualities of composition and the historical contexts of the production and display of documentary photographs. In Rhetorical Exposures, Carter explores Jacob Riis’s heartrending photos of Manhattan’s poor in late nineteenth-century New York, Walker Evans’s iconic images of tenant farmers in west Alabama, Ted Streshinsky’s images of 1960s social movements, Camilo José Vergara’s photographic landscapes of urban dereliction in the 1970s, and Chandra McCormick’s portraits of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward scarred by Hurricane Katrina.

While not ascribing specifically political or Marxist intentions to the photographers discussed, Carter frames his arguments in a class-based dialectic that addresses material want as an ineluctable result of social inequality. Carter argues that social documentary photography has the powerful capacity to disrupt complacent habits of viewing and to prompt viewers to confront injustice. Though photography may induce socially disruptive experiences, it remains vulnerable to the same power dynamics it subverts. Therefore, Carter offers a “rhetoric of exposure” that outlines how such social documentary images can be treated as highly tensioned rhetorical objects. His framework enables the analysis of photographs as heterogeneous records of the interaction of social classes and expressions of specific built environments. Rhetorical Exposures also discusses how photographs interact with oral and print media and relate to creations as diverse as public memorials, murals, and graphic novels.

As the creation and dissemination of new media continues to evolve in an environment of increasing anxiety about growing financial inequality, Rhetorical Exposures offers a very apt and timely discussion of the ways social documentary photography is created, employed, and understood.