Reframing the 1950s:

Poland and America through Photojournalist Lisa Larsen’s Lens

Author

Patryk Babiracki

Abstract

The article examines Lisa Larsen’s pioneering work as a photojournalist for Life Magazine in Poland, 1956-1957, contextualised by her experience as a Jewish exile from Germany in the 1930s. Reading her unpublished writings about Poland against the backdrop of her visual work reveals a woman who appreciated the ambiguity of photography and sought to shape the meaning of her work in a way that challenged the prevailing Cold War epistemologies of midcentury America, often espoused by Life and the Time/Life empire itself. As a woman, she was initially assigned entertainment and fashion work, but her drive to cover politics led her to US presidential campaigns, the Middle East, and the Bandung Conference of 1955. Despite her position as a woman in the world of men at a time when opportunities for professional success among women remained limited, no single full-length academic work on Larsen exists. Larsen left many extraordinary photos that document her extensive travels and experiences. In my article, I draw on her unpublished writings, as well as some published material and her photographs, to argue that through her writing about and photographic work in Poland, Larsen engaged in a subtle critique of the social relations in the United States.

Keywords

Lisa Larsen; Poland; United States; Nazi Germany; cultural Cold War; photography; photo essay; Life Magazine; photojournalism; Jewish émigrés; émigré art; 1950s; women’s history; women photographers.

Introduction

In its July 1, 1957 issue (vol. 43, no. 1), the popular US illustrated Life magazine ran an article titled "The U.S. Exhibit of Freedom, a Hit in Poland." Devoted to the Poznań International Trade Fair, the essay and the accompanying photographs perpetuated two narratives about communist Poland that would be familiar to readers in America. One was what I call the Romantic narrative: the story of Polish struggle for political freedom, heroism, and sacrifice, themes that defined Western conceptions of Poland for centuries. The Life photo depicting this narrative, taken by British businessman Peter Eisler, showed the demonstrators crossing the fair with the bloodstained flag in 1956, taken during the Poznań uprising of June 28 (Jastrząb, 126). The second and central story revolved around the historically tangled themes of East European backwardness and communist inefficiency in contrast to an idealised US version of modernity focused on consumption and consumer choice. Photographs by Lisa Larsen, a German-born, US-based photographer and the subject of this article illustrated that second narrative. Her series of images showed Polish visitors mesmerised by US exhibits, storming the door to the American pavilion, stretching out their hands to touch the samples that the Americans were handing out (Fig. 1). "Some longing looks toward a good life," read one subsection of the article. "The good life," the article’s author made clear, was being enjoyed by America's consumer society ("The US Exhibit," 20).¹

It’s not surprising that Life would tell this story. A popular illustrated weekly, it catered to the particular values and norms of America’s white middle class while addressing “the contradictions and anxieties about national identity in the United States that emerged following the global, social and political upheaval of World War II” (Bussard and Gresh 2020: 18). The magazine’s founder Henry Luce used Life to announce the dawn of the “American Century in 1941,” and relied on bold magazine photography to promote a vision of American exceptionalism tied to its geopolitical pre-eminence in the world (Bussard and Gresh 2020: 18; Swanberg 1972). Luce shaped Life into an instrument of the Cold War, using photography “as evidence, as witness, as counterpoint, as threats, as a spectacle, as a deterrent, and overall as a form of storytelling,” art historian Kristen Gresh has pointed out (Gresh 2020: 189). The magazine’s visual storytelling techniques that focused on faces effectively reduced complex events to simple and reassuring narratives (Panzer 2020: 54).

In the late 1950s, journal editors used Larsen’s photos to reinforce these well-known stories, but Larsen was more interested in employing photography to interrogate the surrounding world. She explored realities in communist Poland that went beyond the typical accounts about Polish heroism and East European backwardness. Larsen used her observations on Poland to question the prevailing norms of midcentury America.

Lisa Larsen’s Polish work serves as a starting point for imagining Larsen’s biography. She was a prolific and accomplished photographer who lived an adventurous, global life. Henry Luce called her “a leading citizen of the world.”² Initially an outsider, she steadily made her way into New York’s cultural establishment. In a profession dominated by men and structured around the male gaze, she was one of Life’s few female photographers; unlike the other women, notably the famous Margaret Bourke-White, Larsen frequently photographed the most powerful politicians and celebrities, many of them men (Panzer 2020: 61; Flamiano 2020:170-179; Flamiano: 2018).³ By the 1950s, it was not uncommon for women to work as photographers. Gerda Taro, Ilse Bing, Dora Maar, Lee Miller shaped the European and American visual cultures through their pioneering photographs, but their names have all too often been forgotten and their roles – marginalised.⁴ Larsen's case is even more surprising, though, for despite her talent, charisma and contemporary recognition, few have reflected on her life and work.⁵ Although her life was short – she was five months short of her thirty-seventh birthday when she died of cancer in 1959 – and she valued her private life, an analysis of her work particularly in Poland is long overdue. Larsen’s drafts for an unpublished book, the bulk of which is devoted to her stay in Poland, constitutes my core archival source.⁶ I also relied on some records of Poland’s communist secret police, which kept Larsen under surveillance during her 1957 stay.

This essay also aims to contribute to the exchanges about the role of individuals in shaping cultural linkages between Eastern Europe and the West during the Cold War. Like numerous photographers and journalists, she broke down the boundaries of the Cold War through forging transnational networks and circulating images (Vowinckel 2017). Lisa Larsen’s case similarly enables us to question oversimplifications stemming from Cold War-era bi-polar politics. Her story also underscores the challenges that photographers faced in pursuing their assignments and visions across the Cold War divide, and the contestation that shifted the meanings of the circulating photographs. Additionally, much of the recent scholarship of Eastern European communism is premised on the discovery of the region as a mosaic of national modernities, distinct from both the Cold War-era discourses that framed countries like Poland as a West-to-be, often conflating these countries' pasts and possible futures with the trajectories of other communist states (Pence and Betts 2008; Reid and Crowley 2000; Bren and Neuburger 2012; Fidelis 2017). Though involved in Cold War institutions as a rising star of the American knowledge-producing elite, her “outsider” status as a recent immigrant and woman helped her retain a critical distance from American life, which shaped her sensibility as an attentive observer of people across the world, and of Eastern Europe in particular. Lisa Larsen was what Joseph Nye would call a “cultural interpreter” of soft power, someone who, as Marsha Siefert noted, “is willing to speak both languages, understand both cultures, in order to explain one to the other” (Siefert 2014). Yet unlike so many other “cultural interpreters” from the United States – some of them female, like the dancer Martha Graham, for instance – Larsen turned her critical eye on America (Phillips 2020: 29). In contrast to many American leftist intellectuals, Larsen idealised neither communism nor the USSR. Although she necessarily participated in political institutions, Larsen sought to develop a vision of the world that could not be easily subsumed into Cold War binaries or national particularities – a vision that can be understood by looking at Lisa Larsen’s life and work.

Numerous historians have painted a rosy picture of the relationship between émigré artists and their adopted homeland, the United States. “As the new champions of the world […] Americans needed a new self-image,” wrote Anthony Heilbut, adding that “émigré photographers captured all the traditional American characteristics –physical strength, forthright emotion, youthful energy – imbued with an iconic force that frequently filled the photographic frame” (Heilbut 1983: 216). But most of them, including Lisa Larsen, developed more complicated ties to their adopted homelands (Flamiano 2016: 7; Pitts 1995: 17). Larsen’s intertwined life stories as an immigrant to the United States and an American photographer in Europe can be productively gleaned through philosopher Vilém Flusser’s reflections on the creative effects of exile. Flusser proposed exile not as a source of victimhood, as it is commonly understood, but as of a form of “data processing” that enables the uprooted to organise the seeming chaos caused by novelty in their lives. Artists channel the intensity of that processing experience into creative activity, which can also help the natives of the land that welcomed him – or her – see their own reality in new ways, defamiliarise it, and even uncomfortably unsettle their perception of the world. For this to happen, “an exchange” must open up between the information that the expelled “has brought with him and an entire ocean with waves of information that toss around him in exile” (Flusser 2002, 108).⁷ Larsen, too, ostensibly “processed” her experiences abroad; her Polish assignments opened up new ways for thinking about America and, more broadly, Larsen’s aesthetic and social sensibilities of the 1950s can be tied to her experience of late 1930s Germany.

Lastly, Larsen’s story contributes to a conversation about the relationship between power and photography in the second half of the twentieth century. The compelling argument that photographic images misrepresent reality, fix hierarchies and naturalise inequalities has been made for over half century (Barthes 2013 [1957]; Brennen 2009: 71-81). "To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed," wrote Susan Sontag in her classic 1977 essay On Photography. "It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and therefore, like power" (Sontag 2008 [1977]: 4). Indeed, at the 1957 “Family of Man” exhibition in Moscow, Nigerian student Theophilus Neokonkwo destroyed several works by Nat Farbman that depicted half-naked, despairing Africans as social inferiors to the clothed, and more dignified Europeans and Americans (Tiefentale 2018). Yet other theorists have emphasised the ambiguity of photographs, and it’s that characteristic that seems distinctly operative in Larsen’s case (Bussard and Gresh 2020: 18). Larsen also contributed to the 1957 exhibition with a photograph of a Guatemalan mother. Larsen’s photographs invite one range of interpretations when viewed one by one, or in the context designed by American illustrated magazines, which is also why they were not out of place in articles celebrating America’s global triumphalism. But her images lend themselves to other readings when viewed in the context of Larsen’s broader oeuvre and the photographer’s own stories that retell her own experiences.

“Photographer”

Around 1950, photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt took a portrait of Lisa Larsen against the blurry backdrop of Manhattan sky rises – perhaps near her apartment at 40 Park Avenue in New York (Fig. 2).

Larsen, grinning, her eyes glowing, is looking directly at the camera, projecting confidence, playfulness and charm. For a biographer, the 1950s seem as clear as Larsen’s image on that photograph. Curiosity led her to follow people all over the world, between 1949, when she was hired as a contract photojournalist for Life magazine, and her untimely death in 1959. Before coming to Poland in late 1956, Larsen photographed the powerful and the famous from Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nikita Khrushchev, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Eleanor Roosevelt, Josip Broz Tito to Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly, as well as the wedding of Jackie Bouvier and John F. Kennedy. In the summer of 1956, upon the invitation of the Mongolian Ambassador to the USSR, Larsen went on an assignment to Outer Mongolia, the first American in a decade to be able to do so. In 1955, Larsen covered the famous Bandung Conference in Indonesia, the first meeting of the leaders of newly independent African and Asian states, subsequently trekking solo across Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.

Smart, quick-witted and ambitious, Larsen was known among colleagues for her dedication to photography and her relentless hard work.⁸ In the last years of her life, Larsen earned several major American prizes in photojournalism. ⁹ She also made her name with her charisma and empathy, which enabled her to form meaningful relationships with her subjects. Larsen’s genuine interest in people allowed her to create individual and collective portraits that brought out their personalities and their psychological depth. Larsen came to prominence in the 1950s; yet much of what we know of her comes from what she chose to disclose in official, award-related interviews, from the impressions left on her acquaintances, and from her photographs.

Larsen’s pre-celebrity years seem more out of focus, like the New York streetscape in the background of Eisenstaedt’s portrait. We know that she was born Lisa Rothschild on 5 August, 1922 in Pforzheim, Germany.¹⁰ Many thought that Larsen was born in 1925 and she did not correct them. Later Lisa, her younger sister Gerty (born in 1925), their parents Cilly (short for Cäcilie, née Cohn) and Mayer lived in the newspaper district of Berlin at Lindenstrasse 60/61 and her mother ran an artificial flowers business (Saure 2020; Keil 2020).¹¹ Lisa received her first camera, “an inexpensive Korelle Reflex” from her mother, who then “slowly furthered her daughter’s interest in photography until Lisa reached the Leica stage.”¹² Lisa studied art photography at a private school in Berlin.¹³ Mayer Rothschild (Cilly called him by his middle name, Max) died in 1935, likely of ill health, though certainly amidst the growing violence against Jews.¹⁴ Cilly and her daughters fled to Holland sometime soon after the Night of the Broken Glass or Kristallnacht, the infamous mass anti-Semitic pogrom of November 9-10, 1938. One year later, on October 28, 1939, seventeen-year-old Lisa departed with her mother for the U.S. on S. S. Veendam, which sailed from Antwerp to New York (her sister Gerty would join them a few weeks later, after overcoming bureaucratic obstacles).¹⁵ In the travel documents, the seventeen-year-old Lisa lists her profession as “photographer.”

Lisa, it seems, consciously followed many German-Jewish photographers who came to the United States in the mid-1930s such as Alfred Eisenstaedt or Fritz Goro. It may be that Cilly encouraged Lisa’s photographic interests in Berlin in order to facilitate emigration from Nazi Germany and to give her daughter a better chance for a job abroad. Success stories of émigré photographers would have encouraged such thinking. Émigré photographers generally avoided restrictive work quotas, as they were entering an expanding job market in the new communication industries. In contrast to refugee journalists, the photographers confronted fewer language-related obstacles in their professional transition (Milton 1986: 279–293). Lisa Larsen travelled from Germany to the US only a moment after the photojournalistic format on which Life itself was based travelled from Germany and France to the United States. The men who introduced the photo essay to the US and Henry Luce himself were a group of German-Jewish émigrés Kurt Korff, Kurt Safransky, Kurt Kornfeld and Ernest Mayer (Smith 1983, 80). The last three had established the Black Star photo agency which brought together many German-Jewish émigré photographers in the US, and in which Larsen would take up her first job as a filing clerk (Smith 1983: 12).¹⁶ Some of Black Star's photographers such as Werner Bischof, Robert Capa and Ernst Haas had been earlier represented by the famous Magnum photo agency; the two agencies fiercely competed and in 1951 even merger discussions were taking place (Kornfeld 2021: 39, 48; Smith 1983: 126). The Black Star photographers shared several characteristics as a group. In C. Zoe Smith’s words, “most of them were Jews; most were well educated and well travelled; most came to photojournalism after studying other subjects and after being involved in other professions; most had worked for a variety of publications while moving around Europe; and most emigrated to the United States during the mid-1930s to pursue their careers and make a new life for themselves and their families” (Smith 1983: 132). Through their work, they raised the status of photojournalism in the United States within the few years that preceded Lisa’s flight from Berlin and stepping off U.S.S. Veendam (Smith 1983: 175). Lisa molded herself as part of that talented, German cosmopolitan cohort for US immigration officials and by potential employers in the US. Shaping her public perception around the formula created by her established predecessors may have been the reason why Larsen maintained publicly, though not fully truthfully, that she finished college at seventeen years of age.¹⁷

Lisa Larsen joined a cohort that defined a unique moment in the history of American photojournalism. Yet as a woman, she used tactics unavailable to men. Ed Thompson, the former managing editor of Life, said that Larsen "was the exact opposite of the precise photographers" such as Alfred Eisenstaedt or Fritz Goro. "She was very persistent,” he added. Smith, the interviewer, tried to clarify: “Aggressive?” Thompson replied: "She was not technically a very good photographer, but she made up for it in other ways." He recalled how she travelled on a Pullman berth with Vice President Alben Barclay on opposite berths and some photos included a self-portrait with her shoes off, Barclay tickling her foot.¹⁸ By comparing Larsen with the “precise” photographers, Thompson underscored a mix of determination, social skills and reliance on large quantities of camera film that defined her style of work.¹⁹

This experience of emigration from Germany and settling in the United States underscores two aspects of Larsen’s photographic interests. The first was fascination with crowds of people: American bargain shoppers and rally participants, immigrants during a naturalisation ceremony, Polish participants in a Catholic mass, crowds cheering on the streets at the Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, audiences transfixed by political speakers. Crowds held an aesthetic appeal for Larsen – as some have noted, the photos Larsen took of the multitudes often capture an interesting interplay between the anonymous collectivity and emotional intimacy that she found on the faces of crowd members. Implying Larsen's contribution to the aesthetics of photography, Ronk noted that she found "a way to make pictures of crowds that both captured the energy of multitudes (and smaller gatherings) while making sure that individual faces weren't lost in the mix" (Ronk 2013). But Larsen’s visual attention to crowds had deeper roots in her fascination with their psychological dynamics, which tested the participants’ sense of themselves as individuals and roles as autonomous agents making rational decisions. During the Cold War, social scientists took up the study of crowds partly out of concern about the power of communism. Larsen’s fascination with crowds was surely shaped by her experience of growing up in Berlin during the rise of Hitler, and an upsurge of violent mass politics that featured parades and pogroms against Jews. If there was one single event that forced the Rothschilds to leave Germany, it was the Kristallnacht. Publicly, Larsen said little about her childhood in Germany, but a short note in her book manuscript reveals the emotional distance that separated her from the country of her birth. Scolded in German by the Polish guard at a banquet for Poland’s and USSR’s top brass in 1957, she commented, “somehow swearing always sounds worse to me in German than in any other language except Russian.” The incident made her “feel defeated for the first time that day,” and the exclusive picture she was hoping to take “was no longer worth it.”²⁰ Interestingly, the incident did little to mar her opinions about Poland, which she viewed sympathetically.

Second, emigration forced Larsen to experience the layered processes of leaving behind something significant to her and the discovery of something new; of camouflage and reinvention of oneself, all of it in adolescence, a crucial period in anyone’s life. Could it be that these overlapping experiences gave the young Lisa Rothschild a distance not only from American society, but from the idea that any society is somehow natural and fixed, by showing her how arbitrary social values, mores and rituals can be? Larsen once told Herbert Keppler: “I dislike anything superficial and I especially dislike superficial relationships" (Keppler 1954: 43). Is it possible that, simultaneously, her passage and her transformation, made her aware of the fact that every human face may be a façade behind which lay deeper, more complicated and potentially more interesting truths? The media theorist Vilém Flusser observed that “the transcendence in which the expelled finds himself causes everything around him and in him to appear provisory, transitory” (Flusser 2020: 106). In Larsen’s case, pursuit of depth was driven by her apparent suspicion of first impressions, which she found antithetical to truth. And her own sense of transcendence, I suggest, prevented Larsen from fully identifying with 1950s America, even though she worked for a journal that embodied the values of her adopted homeland more than any other at that time. But she came to the US as an adolescent, without many frameworks for comparison that would guide her in her professional life. She found some opportunities in the late 1950s in Poland, at a time that coincided with the onset of her terminal disease.

1956: First Takes

Larsen reflected on her experiences in Poland more than in any other place outside of the United States. She first came to Poland for almost two months shortly after “the October revolution,” of 1956, events which elevated Władysław Gomułka to the leadership of the communist party. She took on the project "brimming with curiosity to find out for myself, what happened to a Communist country in ferment." But she also acknowledged in her draft book that she "was filled with apprehension."²¹ It was a good time for a journalist like Larsen to come to Poland. The political transition in Poland and in the USSR produced excitement and anticipation about the future. The Poles, who had been isolated from the world during Stalinism, welcomed Westerners. The Polish illustrated weekly Świat (World), which had been set up based on Life magazine’s photojournalistic formula in 1951, was now free to operate with minimal propagandistic constraints (Wach 2017). The kind of humanistic photography that Life published and Larsen practiced (differences between them notwithstanding), epitomised a break with Stalinist orthodoxy.

At first glance, Larsen’s first registered impressions of Poland differed little from Life's familiar stories about the shoddy communist economy. She thought in images, and images of want struck her upon arrival in the capital, when the porter who carried her bags from the airport terminal to the bus asked if she could pay him in American cigarettes. "Not since the postwar years and my travels to Finland and Italy had I been asked for American cigarettes, at that time a more welcome tip than currency, and always a revealing indication of a low standard of living," she wrote, recalling how the crowd on the bus, with some amusement, watched her dig out a few packs from the bottom of her suitcase.²²

Larsen talked about everyday hardships to ordinary Poles and photographed them. Larsen spent much time with young Poles, thanks to the connections of Jacek, her interpreter. Once she followed him into his dorm room, which he shared with other students of English philology. They all seemed malnourished, but ready to laugh at their predicament. "Wait till you see, what they serve us for dinner," one student told Larsen and invited her to the dorm's dining hall. Larsen followed Jacek "to the dining room basement, a dimly illuminated room, where several students consumed their evening meal consisting of this mealy, brown soup." The boys announced that they called the concoction "Auschwitz 1944."²³ This was ghastly humour; what Larsen appreciated was that the young Poles could find distance between themselves and their own misery.

As was her forté, she also engaged easily with the elites. She found Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz to be "a charming man, simple, human and attractive." As she spoke to him about Poland's hardships, the atmosphere was relaxed, and Larsen "felt completely at ease, asking the Premier to act and be himself, so I could photograph him that way."²⁴ She later met Cyrankiewicz and his wife, actress Nina Andrycz in their small apartment. The three talked in German and French about Cyrankiewicz's books and Andrycz's acting career, and about travel, something that Larsen's interviewees liked but hoped one day to do more. Larsen asked Cyrankiewicz about his other hopes. "We have a hard road ahead of us, especially economic hardships and many serious problems remained to be solved," he said. And then he clarified: "these problems include loans and credits from the West, a complete reshaping and decentralizing of Poland's economy, the safeguarding of her [Poland's] independence and relationship to the Soviet Union, as well as to the West." Larsen asked the couple what they enjoyed doing together in their spare time, and Cyrankiewicz told her that he liked to see Andrycz rehearse on stage; they also listened to music and read books. Larsen took a photo of Cyrankiewicz and Andrycz reading together (Fig. 3). "This intimate photograph later made history in Poland," she wrote.²⁵

Larsen brought nuance to the familiar story of economic failures of communism by highlighting the various Poles’ responses to it, without assuming that America – or the West, or capitalism – will solve the Polish problems through an extraneous formula. Those who knew Larsen often noted her ability to meet people on their own terms.²⁶

In late November, 1956, high politics intervened in the life of the American photographer. In early December, after just over one month's stay, Larsen was expelled from Poland after Life ran an essay about Władysław Gomułka by a former insider of the security police who used his knowledge to discredit Poland’s communists. Larsen had made many friends among Poland’s functionaries, but Life angered the Polish establishment, which demanded the expulsion of their journalist. Larsen pleaded for lenience with a Polish official. "What could Poland gain by throwing out a reporter whose job it is to report facts in pictures and text," she asked. The functionary replied, amicably but firmly: "We are sure now that even if you report facts, your magazine will not print them that way."²⁷ Larsen left on Tuesday, December 3, 1956. With impressions still fresh, she used her time in the United States to continue writing her unpublished book. On March 19, 1957, Life editor Robert Elson sent her an encouraging response to the first batches of text, asking Larsen "to give just slightly more of a feeling that you have an opinion on some of the events that you have witnessed." On April 1, Elson followed up. "You have made many points of your Polish visit come alive very vividly," he enthused, adding that he'd "still like to see more of this when the book begins to come together."²⁸ Larsen underwent her first surgery for breast cancer that spring.

Rewind, Shoot: 1957

Larsen “flew back and forth to Poland” as soon as she felt better, because, Ed Thompson remembered, she felt at home there (Kazimierowska 2017: 162). The journalist's earlier expulsion was designed to send a message to Life, but once the message was delivered, the Polish authorities allowed Larsen to go back. Larsen returned to Poland seven months later, for the first anniversary of the Poznań rebellion. This is when she shot many photos of the commemorations, capturing the symbolic elements of Poland’s Romantic narrative: solemn commemorations of the Poznań rebellion and the Catholic mass celebrated by Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, who had been released from prison in late October, 1956. She continued to reflect on the everyday realities defined by material scarcity, greyness seeming almost natural on the black and white photographs. After landing in Warsaw, Larsen travelled to Lublin, Warmia and Mazury regions and the Cegielski enterprise in Poznań, where the June 28 rebellion had begun.²⁹ She noticed some changes: the revival of "private enterprise" and Polish girls on Warsaw’s Nowy Świat street wearing nicer clothes. Yet conversations with people convinced Larsen that a huge gap continued to divide the promises of the socialist project and ordinary people's aspirations. "We can now talk and we are not afraid the police will come and get us," a worker from the Cegielski enterprise told Larsen. But he added that “that is about all we have gained.”³⁰

US commentators often assumed that once rid of communism, Poland would evolve into a version of America. But Larsen understood the complexities of Europe and asked Poles what they wanted their country to become, and how it could be achieved. "We earn too little to live and too much to die, so let us live today," a resigned 25-year-old engineer proposed in a toast at a party that Larsen once attended in Warsaw.³¹ Larsen met with Marxist students, and with those who waited for the US to liberate Poland from the USSR. "Why is America not sending us guns and ammunition?" asked Bogdan. Larsen was "shocked" and sceptical. "But we want freedom, don't you understand that?" her interlocutor pushed. Larsen recalled: "I told him, I thought I did understand what freedom meant, but that it must be achieved in Poland in a different way, not through the use of force."³² Larsen’s interpreter coped with politics by escaping from it, preferring "watching from the sidelines, while he buried himself in books and science."³³ Though she did not know it, and the exact nature of his involvement remains unclear, Jacek also informed on Larsen’s activities to the security police. Larsen noted that at the Moscow youth festival, irate young Soviets challenged Polish philosophers, "Are you sure you are building a Socialist system in your country?" The average Pole could not care less what the system is called. He is fed up with politics, but his imagination could really be fired, if someone showed him the 'Polish road to prosperity.'³⁴

In a published profile piece in Modern Photography in 1959, Larsen stressed her desire to understand Poland. "I have endeavoured to communicate in depth to people, primarily in the West, what life is like in a Communist country." She added: "It was fascinating to be living so close to the splashing of a historical fount and observe historical continuity which I found photographable. Here a photographer had the unique opportunity of writing history in pictures." She noted that with her work she had "tried to convey how a political event has altered the lives of individuals in Poland, specifically how it affected the feelings and emotions of the people" (Keppler 1959: 76). Larsen wrote that "conditions inside Poland today could best be described as confused and mildly chaotic"³⁵ Her photography captured that chaos, translating the polyphony of voices into multiple perspectives. The portraits and intimate photographs of crowds, the images of top communists and ordinary Polish citizens became a visual kaleidoscope that helped Larsen convey a sense of Poland's confused state. "Daily life is punctuated with an advanced degree of demoralization, of corruption, theft and drunkenness," she noted.³⁶ On another occasion, she participated in the art students' costume ball where the young people "turned the Warsaw theatre into the merriest, bounciest rock'n roll demonstration I ever witnessed." She added that "the party, which lasted till 6 a.m., had the flair of a Left Bank Paris scene" (Fig. 4).³⁷

But Poland sometimes defied comparisons. "Moscow and Paris have one thing in common, the sight of women walking down the streets, carrying unwrapped long loaves of bread tucked under their arms," she wrote. In Warsaw, she "found a pretense at least, 'to preserve appearance.' Though there is a shortage of wrapping paper, women do not carry bread on the city streets, but often hand it to their waiting husbands, who tuck it into a briefcase," Larsen observed.³⁸ This image of a Polish couple seems light and accidental; yet the theme of men's attentiveness to women's needs forms a recurrent motif in Larsen’s writing, and one that can help us understand the photographer’s critical attitude towards social relations in the United States.

Double Exposures I: Gender Roles

Metaphorically, double exposure can serve to explain how Lisa Larsen, while working in Poland, reflected on the United States. Photographers can layer multiple exposures on a single image to achieve unusual effects. The same person, object or view captured in different situations within one frame may invite questions about the passage of time. The same technique may be used to capture movement. Overlaying seemingly unrelated contexts can make us think about simultaneity, universality, resemblance, difference or random chance. In the 1950s, that layering of Polish and American experiences was filtered through the messianic visions of Cold War-era America. "Her pictures from Poland," one typical article opined, "told the story of a determined, strong-willed people edging to the brink of disaster in the search for a breath of freedom."³⁹ At Life, photographers shaped their own stories throughout the gestation stage. But their visions and intentions were often lost in the process that involved brainstorming sessions with other editors, photographers and reporters who also worked in response to broader political, social and commercial considerations of Life (Bussard and Gresh 2020: 19-21; Bair 2020: 128-163). In 1954, W. Eugene Smith became so frustrated with the control he had lost over his own artistic vision that he quit (Bair 2020: 129; Loengard 1998” 159). Ed Thompson told C. Zoe Smith in an interview that the émigré photographers’ outsider status made them assets to Life because “their cameras [were] offering a fresh look at institutions, people and places” (Smith 1983, 176). Yet since Henry Luce’s Life also promoted American exceptionalism, the new angles of vision rarely translated into unsettling self-critical perspectives that Vilém Flusser described. As an individual, Larsen tried to recoup some of the agency that she had lost.

The most personal for Larsen was the question of gender relations and norms. Upon their first meeting, premier Cyrankiewicz told the surprised Larsen that his wife threatened to throw out his books if he continued to collect them at their small apartment, so he brought them to his office instead. "I was highly amused by this explanation," she wrote, adding, tongue-in-cheek: "Like all good husbands should, even the Premier of Poland takes orders from his wife, and I expressed the wish to meet the lady, who managed so successfully."⁴⁰ It seems that Larsen also read Andrycz – and, by extension, Poland – as an attractive alternative to the American style of patriarchy.

Certainly, she saw some aspects of Polish life in the context of her own challenges to the accepted social norms in the United States. Unlike most Polish men, Larsen’s interpreter Jacek refused to greet her by kissing her hand, because he knew that one did not do it in the US. But Larsen didn't mind. She remembered that "the grizzly old doorman at the Bristol Hotel kissed my hand whenever I entered the lobby, and so did my chauffeur. After a while I became so accustomed to it, that I automatically stretched out my arm whenever I was introduced to Poles." Some friends made fun of her; Larsen told them that she was starting to enjoy it. "Somehow, this little gesture made me feel like a woman who was accepted as a woman, even though she is battling in a man's business world," she wrote. She immediately thought of the United States. "What hilarious and revolutionary changes could this custom bring about, if it were introduced in the U.S. business world! If editors, for example, would bend down to kiss my hand before they send me out to cover a fire. If masculine charm were to replace the 'treat them rough and alike' routine of the football coach, in which U.S. males pitifully [sic] acknowledge their own sense of insecurity, when they retreat to their exclusive male paddock of the 'superior vocal cords, the swear words and the table pounding,” she wrote.⁴¹

Sometimes awkwardly, Larsen contested the prevailing norms in the US. In a later letter to Life, journalist Leon Jaroff described Larsen as someone who "could be very domineering on a story, insisting on her own way if she were convinced that it meant getting more and better pictures." During one assignment, Larsen asked Jaroff to hold her handbag, while she ventured forward for a camera shoot. "The purse," he remembered, "was the straw basket kind, bedecked with multi-coloured artificial flowers." Jaroff recalled that "It was at this point that our relationship changed." He remembered shouting: "Dammit, Lisa, I'm a man and you're a woman. You hold the purse and I'll shoot the picture." In response, she cried and continued to shoot, but put her purse on the ground. She later apologised, and she and Jaroff got along very well ever since.⁴² Situations such as this may have shaped Larsen’s sensitivity to the interactions between men and women in Poland – and her sense that there, women enjoyed a different kind of margin of power in relations with men.

Larsen’s projections of Poland onto America can seem naïve, but she had reasons to feel that men in this part of Europe took her seriously. "Poland," she wrote, "for me was an eye-opener that respect."⁴³ She was once in charge of negotiating the distribution of American periodicals in Poland. The Poles seemed reluctant, but Larsen persevered, and the Poles agreed to Larsen's proposal to start the distribution immediately. The traditional idea of women as wives and mothers prevailed in communist Poland. But these ideas also blended with demands on men (especially middle-class men) to be polite and chivalrous deriving from the culture of aristocracy. Traditionalism sometimes dissolved in socialism's egalitarian rhetoric and practices, which encouraged more women to work and advance their careers (Fidelis 2020). Patriarchy and gender inequalities continued to shape Polish society, but they were less pronounced than in the United States, something that Larsen appreciated. It is also true that most Poles who came into contact with Larsen had more reasons to behave courteously because she was a Western guest.

Larsen’s thinking about gender relations built on her sustained interest in the roles of powerful women in the United States. For Life, she explored visually the lives of different American women and through them, different aspects of women’s experience. She especially followed those women who strove to shape the world outside the home. Larsen was unique among photographers to have given attention to women participating in politics; as part of her 1952 campaign series, she focused on two women, photographing their campaign work (Metcalf, no date). Larsen spent a day quasi-stalking Grace Kelly in a rented limo, an episode that ended amicably.⁴⁴ She accompanied a young woman, Mary Lloyd-Rees, during her first days at Wellesley.⁴⁵ Larsen photographed assistant secretary of defence Anna Rosenberg for a photo essay titled "Busiest Woman in the US," Life, January 21, 1952, 79- ).⁴⁶ “What is remarkable about the tiny, scurrying woman at right is not that she carries a purseful of feminine gimcracks, or that she carries a dispatch case full of the nation’s most important business, but that she carries both at once,” the essay began.⁴⁷ The article is in tune with the contemporary US public culture which made it hard to disaggregate women’s roles as independent, powerful actors from their roles as guardians of domesticity (Phillips 2020: 8). But despite these nods to the surrounding norm, it also makes it clear that it’s Rosenberg’s hard work and handling of responsibility that makes her admirable and unusual. One section of the article carries the title: “Immigrant girl holds her own with the brass.”⁴⁸

Like Rosenberg, Larsen also strove to both challenge and accommodate contemporary expectations of femineity. Simultaneously, she navigated between two roles, that of the subject and that of an object of visual scrutiny. That constant switching constituted a continuity between her experiences abroad, whether it be Asia, or Poland, or America. Crowds on the street of Bandung responded enthusiastically to the young female American photographer when Larsen was covering the Afro-Asian conference, and local press regularly mentioned her (Shimazu 2014, 243). Larsen’s profile piece for the "13th Annual News Pictures of the Year'' began by quoting an Italian newspaper, which had noted that "Life once had the brilliant idea of sending to Moscow a buxom blonde photographer, a sort of Marilyn Monroe." It noted unequivocally that "needless to say, Lisa's shots were unusual – and excellent," and included Larsen's own commentary on her work. "I think photography in general is a challenging profession for women, and the field is certainly wide open to anyone with talent, intelligence and boundless energy," Larsen said. That's because "women can be good photographers much in the same way that they can become good doctors, good cooks or whatever they choose to be good at.⁴⁹

The unequal world that required proclamations about women’s ability to excel professionally gave certain advantages to those who dared to try.⁵⁰ Larsen stood out in the crowd of photojournalists. Powerful men liked having her around. In 1953, Larsen accompanied Rudolph Halley, the liberal candidate for mayor of New York on a motorcade tour through Manhattan and the Bronx. The reception in the Bronx worried Halley, so he invited Larsen to ride in his open car, just next to the driver, making the tour "a roaring success."⁵¹ Vice president Alben Barkley called Larsen "Mona Lisa," and relished her presence on his campaign trail ("this is your competition," he is said to have introduced Larsen to his bemused wife. As Ed Thompson told C. Zoe Smith, this “brought down the house.” Larsen also snapped a photo of Barkley eating breakfast in his pyjamas, considered “one of her best”).⁵² US state secretary Dulles allowed Larsen to photograph him swimming in the Caribbean Sea.⁵³ Appreciative Khrushchev gave Larsen a bouquet of peonies. During his visit to Poland in 1957, Ho Chi Minh spotted Larsen, who followed him around, and confessed: "If I were a young man, I'd be in love with you."⁵⁴ Larsen did not say if she appreciated or resented this kind of attention. She regularly had to negotiate her own position as a female photographer wherever she went. She found those negotiations to be smoother and more pleasant in Poland than in the United States.

Double Exposures II: The Ambiguity of Crowds

Larsen explored these issues of gender relations and roles alongside broader questions about freedom and individual agency. Under fascism and communism, images of crowds evoked the emancipatory potential of mass action, collective will and political legitimacy.⁵⁵ In the works of Western social scientists and critical theorists, they often reflected deep anxieties about conformity engendered by totalitarianism or capitalism (Gleason 1995). In Larsen's eyes, the potential to build or destroy was wired into any multitude. Liz Ronk observed that Larsen's photography makes us question whether any given crowd is an "audience" or a "mob" (Ronk 2013). The psychological depth, political resonance and consistency of Larsen's subversive focus make her contribution to photography unique.

While covering the 1952 presidential election for Life, she lavished her attention on the people who cast the ballots – the actual voters. As Eric Metcalf noted, this was unlike the magazine's other photographers such as Alfred Eisenstaedt, who were mostly interested in the political candidates. "The election wasn't going to be won solely on the basis of the opinions of political leaders,” Metcalf noted. He added “Larsen chose to remind readers that it was still the voter who would cast the ballot" (Metcalf). Metcalf’s insights can be applied to Larsen’s photos of crowds everywhere. They are especially relevant to her work in communist countries such as Poland, where authoritarian governments quelled individual freedoms and human rights. Some have noted that Larsen’s photographs of crowds are “curiously intimate.” This was likely more than an aesthetic concern: challenging America’s Cold-War exceptionalism, the photographs suggest that regardless of context, each person carried the potential for change. Larsen issued the challenge even more directly by exploring the crowds’ universal ability to destroy, subsuming individual will into the frenzy of their own internal force.

One such situation took place in a Warsaw’s swanky department store, the Centralny Dom Towarowy (CDT). "To get the feeling of a foreign city and its people, I like to walk through the street for hours on end and follow the crowds," Larsen wrote, observing that in the Polish capital "it was almost impossible to avoid crowds and be swept along with them, because they were everywhere." One day, walking around with her interpreter Jacek, she followed such a crowd to the CDT, adorned by its signature "fuchsia-coloured neon sign," only to get into one of the most dangerous situations during her Polish stay. Though Jacek discouraged her from walking up, Larsen went to see the fifth floor only to discover "a huge screaming mob." Guarded by police, "hundreds of hands stretched out for a precious numbered ticket, as if they were starving for the last loaf of bread." Alas, "the riot had nothing to do with starvation," she realised; instead, customers were fighting over mouton furs that had shipped that morning, a rare consumer item in the socialist state. Suddenly, a man took a swing at Larsen with a wooden plank, but she hid behind the counter and then left quietly, accompanied by her interpreter.⁵⁶ Larsen took many photos of customers in the CDT department store, some lined up at counters, others scrutinising the merchandise. Life published these different takes, but it’s the photos of the “fur riot,” as she dubbed the incident jokingly, showing women fighting for consumer goods appeared most often in the American press (Fig. 5). In April, 1959, The Sign: National Catholic Magazine published the photo with a caption: “Like the women seeking goods that cannot fill the demand, Poland lives on freedom in short supply.”⁵⁷

Journal editors used the photograph as evidence of misery under communism. For Larsen, the scene put into perspective the destructive social forces present both in Poland and in the United States. In her draft book she wrote how "once during a rally for Senator McCarthy at Madison Square Garden, two New Jersey delegates got so angered that their picture was being taken, that they started a riot and had me forcefully evicted from the Garden (Fig. 6)." Angry crowds complicated the job of a photographer. "The most difficult subject for me to photograph are angry people," in Larsen’s view. "People in a state of aroused emotional tension seem to resent the presence of a photographer partially, because his presence tends to make them more acutely aware of their anger. Frequently, this anger is transfered [sic] from the actual object to the nearest tangible subject, the photographer. The forces which had aroused the McCarthyites in Madison Square Garden were the same forces, that moved the Warsaw fur rioters into action against this photographer."⁵⁸ As if in a double exposure, Larsen layered agitated McCarthyites and Polish fur shoppers into a one frame.

Visual resonances between Poland and America multiplied on CDT’s lower levels. "On the first floor, a ladies underwear counter reminded me of Ohrbach's bargain basement, where women stood several lines deep, pressing, pushing and screaming when someone took too much time to select the right shape and color of..."⁵⁹ Ohrbach’s was the new American department store selling inexpensive clothes, mostly to women. Larsen did a shoot at Ohrbach’s Union Square location in New York in 1952, capturing women’s frantic hunt for clothes (Fig. 7). Her photographs accompanied Herbert Brean’s article titled “High-Style-Cash-and-Carry” in the January 26, 1953 issue of Life.⁶⁰ Brean profiled the company, describing its novel but seemingly counterintuitive business model that included minimal advertising, few sales personnel, remote store locations and unavailability of services that women enjoy in other department stores, but is also able to achieve low prices and high volume sales.

Larsen shot many photos of frenzied crowds for this story, but only the first page of the article featured one. Taken from above (like the CDT photos would later), it shows about twenty women of various ages, standing close to one another in a small space, each tense and agitated. A still frame, we can tell the women are moving about, looking in different directions. One group in the foreground is gathering around a pile of clothes, inspecting it closely, nervously – a conflict over a piece of garment seems inevitable. The caption explains: “Bargain hunters at Ohrbach’s lay siege to a main floor counter of 14^th Street Store where ‘cobblers,’ a species of apron, are being sold for only 59 c.”⁶¹

Captions and commentaries about Warsaw’s “fur riot” would project gravitas. In contrast, the Ohrbach’s frenzied crowd merited a funny anecdote about “one genteel lady who was caught up in the crush milling around an Ohrbach’s table of doeskin gloves.” Larsen saw meaning in what connected her Polish and American experience: the scores of people losing their individuality, clarity of judgment and dignity to a mysterious overwhelming force. Half a century earlier, psychologist Gustave Le Bon termed this force “crowd psychology (la psychologie des foules).” Among many things, he observed that “little adapted to reasoning, crowds, on the contrary, are quick to act” (Le Bon 1996 [1895]).

In the spring of 1957, Larsen's photographic realities physically converged when Ohrbach’s organised a fashion show at the Poznań International Trade Fair. Larsen happened to be documenting the annual event, which also marked the U.S. debut at an East European trade fair after Stalin’s death. Just during the first two days at the fair Larsen shot thirty-two rolls of film, some twelve hundred and eighty photographs, "mostly of the stands of the US and the USSR."⁶² Americans expected the textiles to be a big hit. "U.S. Fashions go to Poland for Exhibit: Spring Tints Are Muted in Flowering Cottons," The New York Times announced on April 5, 1957. The author, Nan Robertson, predicted optimistically that "This spring, even the Poles may be saying, "I can get it for less at Ohrbach's," which was chosen as "the average American store" to deliver all the fashion items for the US Pavilion that year.⁶³ The American mass media framed the Ohrbach’s show as a triumphant story about America's quest to save Polish people from communism; among them was the Life article accompanied by Larsen’s photographs. But the Polish secret police documents show that the Polish visitors had mixed feelings about the Ohrbach’s offerings. Most anticipated the American show with excitement, seeing Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome rise. The modern home appliances on display at the adjacent single family home dazzled many Poles. But the textiles let many people down. "The famed American pavilion is a huge disappointment,” someone wrote in a letter intercepted by the police. “There's nothing in there. Our Polish one is the prettiest one, America wouldn't be ashamed of such beautiful fabrics."⁶⁴ Another author echoed these sentiments: "US showed only ugly stuff: ugly fabrics and faux jewelry.⁶⁵ Someone else noted that “All visitors leave [the US pavilion] with disappointed faces. Apparently they brought a few fabulously colourful chiffons, extremely tasteless, gaudy.”⁶⁶ At Poznań, Americans misread their audiences: they brought inexpensive clothes to upstage the Soviets, who showcased furs; but they failed to impress the audiences in a country where textile production was historically strong (Crowley 1999: 68). Overall, the reception of Ohrbach’s resonated less with Life's triumphalist story about America's quest to save Polish people from communism and more with Lisa Larsen’s own vision which acknowledged those ambiguities of the human experience that eluded political Manichaeism.

Last Frames

Larsen told photographer Herbert Keppler that overcoming superficiality required extremely hard work "You work under pressure. You have a day – a week. [...] You find yourself working more intensely when time is extremely limited."⁶⁷ She likely meant nothing more than to refer to her fast-paced work as a photojournalist, which rarely gave her the time to get to know her subjects well. Still, her words seem oddly meaningful. Larsen was gravely ill at that time. In the spring of 1957, she had a surgery for breast cancer, but the disease spread to her neck and it was clear that it was terminal.⁶⁸ This means that while in Poland, she was working in the dark shadow of existential uncertainty about her future. Her physical decline likely contributed to the intensity of Larsen’s work in Poland. She knew that she was racing against time, and that knowledge must have given her efforts an aura of extreme urgency. As Gloria Hoffman wrote in an attentive article in Leica Photography, "Miss Larsen continued to work courageously and with spirit, making three trips to Europe after her last operation" (Hoffman 1959: 24). Besides her relatively long stay in Poland, among which were Khrushchev’s visit to Hungary in 1958. Larsen died on Sunday, March 8, 1959 in her home at 40 Park Ave. She was a few months shy of reaching her thirty-seventh birthday. Most newspapers reported erroneously, though consistently with Larsen’s preferred version, that she was thirty-four.⁶⁹

Through her photojournalism, Lisa Larsen sought to overcome superficiality by challenging certain clichés of midcentury America. She captured intimate expressions on faces in crowds in communist Poland and photographed frenzied masses of shoppers in the United States. In her search for instances of female agency – examples of how and why women can shape the world and live dignified and fulfilling lives – she was examining critically not only the complacency of American exceptionalism but also the prevailing gender norms. At the same time, Larsen was a photojournalist, and photographs don’t speak for themselves. Journalists and editors most often used Larsen’s visual work to lend credence to the notion that America was a package of special elements, superior to anything behind the Iron Curtain in every way. Examining her oeuvre together and outside of the context of the magazines that featured her work piecemeal helps us see the photographic counternarrative that emerged from Lisa Larsen’s systematic questioning.

One also gets the impression that Larsen became increasingly aware that she needed words to disambiguate the meaning of her photographs. Herbert Keppler recalled a 1951 incident in which Dwight Eisenhower arrived from Europe and Life sent Larsen to shoot the president’s airport interviews. Once the questions concluded, Larsen herself inquired whether Eisenhower hadn’t changed his mind. In Keppler’s words, “Eisenhower looked up with a grin: ‘You’re a photographer, not a reporter. You’re not supposed to ask me questions’” (Keppler 1954: 41). Larsen told Keppler that she had posed her question to elicit on the president’s face an expression of frank surprise. This may have been true; but what she also realised by the late 1950s was that in her quest to challenge the superficial she could not rely on photographs alone. In a 1956 interview, Life editor Daniel Longwell proposed naively – or perhaps somewhat disingenuously – that words explained photographs, somehow filling the gaps left out by still, silent images. “The picture would tell as much of the story as it could,” he said, “and the words would continue the explanation” (Panzer 2020: 48). What comes through in Larsen’s own writing, however, is what must have been clear to the photographer herself: that words, too, could lead the understanding of the viewers in many different directions. The writing process may have helped Larsen gain more control over the meaning of her photographs.

A pattern in anyone’s life hardly implies a consciously executed master plan. It is likely that Larsen herself grappled with the meaning of her visual interests, passions and obsessions as she grew older and more mature. Henry Luce, the publisher of Life, understood his magazine’s operations in terms of two rhythms: the breakneck cycle of textual news production, and a slower, “reflective” one, which also fit closer with the more complicated and protracted publication of photographs (Hill 2020: 64). One could say that Larsen’s long-time personal growth set a third rhythm in which new images she saw, found, and processed, came to resonate with the photographs she had taken years before. In that sense Poland was a revelation to her; as she developed a liking for the country and its inhabitants, she also gained distance to America. Her experiences there, in addition to her struggle with a terminal disease, made Larsen’s effort to convey her own understanding of her own photography at that moment ever more urgent, I believe. It is possible to appreciate the complexities of Larsen's thinking largely thanks to her unpublished writings preserved by individuals and institutions. One can only hope that more documents related to the life of the photographer will eventually come to light.

In the last months of her life Larsen tried to write but pain made it difficult. Edward Thompson saw her in December, “propped up in a chair, swathed in scarfs, staying lucid on barbiturates and brandy,” but hardly feeling sorry for herself.⁷⁰ Somewhere in early 1959, she wrote to Edward Thompson, the managing editor of Life: "Ed, dear," she began, and in a barely legible handwritten letter replete with misspelled words told him about her pain, about how “being well informed about world's affairs” remained among her few pleasures, about how she would call him “in a week or so” and “perhaps you might want to drop in.” She thanked Thompson profusely for continuing her retainer, which was making it possible to pay for her treatment.⁷¹ On February 19, Thompson replied, conveying distant empathy. He was "sorry you have been having some miseries," but since "these things" had the pattern of coming and going, Larsen might soon feel in the shape to call him on the phone. He then talked shop, awkwardly apologising for asking Larsen to soften some of her own thoughts on the U.S.-backed dictator of South Korea, Syngman Rhee. Wrote Thompson: "I don't think we should blast Rhee, who is essentially a fairly strong friend of ours, until he has shown unmistakably that he's off the reservation for good […] Hate to be talking like a State Department type but...." Thompson left the thought hanging, but whatever criticism Larsen had of Rhee, Thompson did not yet want to see in print – likely because his boss, Henry Luce knew and admired him as a staunch anti-communist (Swanberg 1972: 334-335).⁷² Though it sounds like a cliché, Lisa Larsen continued to challenge the ontological contrasts of midcentury America through her dying days.

Patryk Babiracki
University of Texas at Arlington

Acknowledgement

I had the privilege of presenting a version of this essay at a mini-conference "'Mind the Gap': New Directions in History, Culture and Diplomacy in a Time of COVID” at the London School of Economics on November 19, 2020. I thank the participants for their feedback, and especially Victoria Phillips for her generous comments on the first draft. I am grateful to Ms. Phoebe Kornfeld, for sharing her deep knowledge of history of photojournalism and making accessible archival materials related to Lisa Larsen; Mr. Lars-Broder Keil, for helping me understand better Lisa's childhood and suggesting further leads; a member of Lisa's family (who wished to remain anonymous) for his insights and clarifications; Claartje van Dijk and Sara Ickow at New York’s International Center of Photography for their help with archival documents; the peer reviewers at Apparatus for their suggestions and comments; and the Journal's Editors for their constructive feedback and enthusiasm. Research of this essay was possible thanks to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Research Enhancement Program at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Bio

Patryk Babiracki is Associate Professor in Russian and East European history at the University of Texas at Arlington. His book Soviet Soft Power in Poland: Culture and the Making of Stalin’s New Empire, 1943-1957 appeared with the University of North Carolina Press in 2015. He also co-edited two collections of essays devoted to transnational history of socialism and authored articles in academic and popular periodicals, including New Eastern Europe, The Washington Post and The Wilson Quarterly. Babiracki’s current project re-examines Poland's twentieth-century history in its global context through the lens of the Poznań International Trade Fair.

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Suggested Citation

Babiracki, Patryk. 2021. “Reframing the 1950s: Poland and America through Photojournalist Lisa Larsen’s Lens”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 13. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2021.00013.271

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