This edited collection offers the first comparative, inter-disciplinary exploration of global Cold War visual culture. The book brings together an international team of renowned and emerging scholars from multiple disciplines to broaden discussion beyond the handful of iconic Euro-American images, which have framed how the Cold War has often been seen — and not been seen. Expanding the familiar prism of the US-USSR superpower bipolarity that has dominated debates on Cold War culture, Cold War Camera spotlights the crucial roles played by largely overlooked and underdeveloped Cold War sites of visual exchange. This new approach to analysis expands Cold War structures of feeling to take account of not just familiar negative feelings of fear and paranoia — manifest in the critical emphasis on a hermeneutics of suspicious — but also positive feelings, including sympathy and hope. Taken together, the essays in this volume demonstrates how Cold War visual culture produces new subject positions and establishes circuits of solidarity.

The volume is forthcoming at Duke University Press in Spring 2022.