“Magic Tape” and “The New Ju-Ju”: Space and Materiality in Wire Photography’s Atlantic Geography

In the interwar period, wire photography services began using a device similar to a fax machine to separate images from their material supports as analogue information. Communications hubs such as New York, London, and Buenos Aires formed the core of an Atlantic network in which news pictures circulated by wire, radio, and airplane. However, only with great difficulty could this network reach beyond the places where visual telecommunications infrastructure, and its attendant media such as halftone photoengraving and daily newspapers, existed. In this talk, I will show how the production of this space also constituted a liminal zone as its exterior, by addressing the American Office of War Information’s attempt to integrate Central Africa into this system during World War Two. In Central Africa, difficult material conditions for telecommunications and printing coincided with colonial social and political dynamics to frustrate attempts to connect Africans to a larger visual public sphere.

Jonathan Dentler is currently the Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow in Paris, where he is associated with the LARCA and HAR research groups at the Université de Paris and Université Paris Nanterre. He recently received his Ph.D. from USC, and his dissertation is a global history of wire photography services.