Manifest Documentary

Abstract

abstract: This article argues that the symbolic and material power of Manifest Destiny inhered in the norms of documentary photography at Life magazine, particularly in preexisting shooting scripts. An analysis of visual re-takes and narrative fixity in the 1947 photo-essay on the Indian Partition, "The Great Migration," reveals how tropes of US settler colonialism were projected onto distressed refugees in South Asia. The norm of having photographed subjects enact script-image correlation was a revenue-minded colonial action; it absorbed a range of racial differences—South Asian, Black American, and Native American—into the fantasy of postwar US hegemony.