Picturing Displaced Persons (DPs), Exhibiting French Prestige?

Abstract

This article explores how photography documenting humanitarian aid in French-occupied Germany was mobilized to enhance France’s image, against the backdrop of increasing anxieties about its international standing. It draws on images found in the archives of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the French occupation zone , which sat between the ‘official’ and the ‘private’. In doing so, it calls for a recognition of the role of amateur and relief workers photographers in sustaining post-war visual discourses of internationalism and national-self fashioning. Although largely overlooked today, these images play a role in wider debates about what it meant to be ‘French’ in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation. Relief workers and amateur photographers built on and reproduced aspects of the widely disseminated narrative about the universalism of resistance to disrupt images of the zone as a refuge for wartime collaborators. This neglected aspect of humanitarian imagery offers fresh insights into the contribution of these photographers to post-war diplomatic strategies.