"WAR OF PICTURES". Press Photography in Austria 1945-1955

After the Second World War, the four Allied occupying powers set up photographic services in Austria in order to document, in pictures, the war damage and reconstruction. The photographic material was made available to the illustrated press in Austria. The most influential picture service was run by the Americans under the leadership of the press photographer Yoichi Okamoto, who according to one of the central hypotheses of the project trained his Austrian staff in modern Life photography. Yet hardly any information exists on the protagonists of Austrian press photography in the immediate post-war era. The proposed research project seeks to close this gap in the research: for the first time, all the staff of the Allied picture services as well as freelance Austrian press photographers active in this period will be identified, the organisational structures of the photographic services will be described, the interplay between national and international picture agencies will be documented, and the channels of distribution for press photography will be analysed. This will be followed by biographical research on the press photographers identified, resulting in a collective biographical study that deals, in particular, with the aspect of ideological continuities between the pre- and post- war eras. A further focus of the research project lies in an investigation into the publication context of the press photographs. Text-image analyses carried out on selected case studies will reveal how the Cold War was manifested at the level of imagery as a "war of pictures" in the daily newspaper Wiener Kurier and in the illustrated weekly magazines Wiener Bilderwoche, Große Österreich Illustrierte, Wiener Illustrierte and Welt- Illustrierte. At the level of photographic aesthetics, comparison and analyses of the pictures will dis-/prove the hypothesis of Okamoto`s introduction of American Life photography and show whether he had a lasting influence on Austrian press photographers. The proposed research is located at the interface between different disciplines such as media and communication studies, history, cultural studies, semiotics and art history. Approaches from modern journalism research and cultural semiotics will be synthesised to create a method that can deal simultaneously with organisational structures, active participants and photographic-journalistic products. This multiperspectival strategy also corresponds to the proposed combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods. The research project sees itself as a contribution to pictorial culture in Austria after 1945. Through its networked approach, it will enable new insights to be gained in the historical research of press photography.

The research project "War of Pictures. Press Photography in Austria 1945 - 1955 "was conducted under the project leadership of Prof. Friedrich Hausjell and with the collaboration of Dr. Marion Krammer and Dr. Margarethe Szeless from 2014 to 2018 at the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna. It comprises three main research areas: The first focus of the research project was dedicated to the image services and the image politics of the Allied occupying powers. The exploration of the picture services was based on comprehensive archive material from the archives of all four victorious powers. The evaluation of these archival materials allows for the first time a look into the organizational structure of the Allied image services. The following questions could be answered: who were the responsible authorities for image propaganda? Where did the picture services get their press photos from? Which Austrian press photographers worked for Allied image services? The second focus was on biography and career development research. For this purpose, the Austrian press photographers active in the first post-war decade were surveyed and a database with biographies of 195 press photographers was compiled and made accessible to the public (https://datenbankpressefotografie.univie.ac.at). Fundamental to the biographical research was the rediscovered archive of the Syndicate of the Austrian Press Photographers and the evaluation of the entry files of the members. In her dissertation, Marion Krammer dealt with this long-forgotten generation of press photographers and compiled a "collective biography" of the post-war photography reporter. She paid particular attention to the question of career continuity and breaks to Austrofascism and National Socialism. The third research question dealt with image propaganda in the Austrian post-war illustrated magazines. For this purpose, extensive quantitative surveys were carried out in the Austrian magazines with the help of students, and around 60,000 individual image records from the most influential Austrian magazines were recorded and the corresponding press photographs were scanned. Using thematic clusters and qualitative image analyzes, the "battle of images" in the Cold War was analyzed and described.