Seeing Is Informing: The Visual Logic of Early Cold War Anti-Communism

Anti-communist surveillance in the U.S. during the early Cold War, this paper argues, rested on a logic of visual communication. Construing American communists to be dangerous because they were ordinary looking "Masters of Disguise," leading law enforcement and intelligence experts like J. Edgar Hoover underscored the necessity of abilities for detection, recognition and identification as prerequisites of successful undercover work and obtaining information. But while the many efforts of visualizing the invisible sought to reduce complexity and establish stable enemy images, they also always contained highly ambiguous visual messages that contradicted this objective and kept the act of informing precarious. 

Deploying a variety of different visual sources – mug shots, press photographs, cartoons, films – this paper charts the visuality of American anti-communism through the Cold War years. Following a brief outline of the era’s visual logic, the paper emphasizes how this dense presence of various images established a productive field of surveillance which created ‘others’ as well as ‘selves,’ and which ultimately failed in its objective to secure definite and stable knowledge.