Shots Made around the World
The Department of Army Special Photographic Office (DASPO) was created to document U.S. Army activities during the Cold War, with much of the work centered on the Vietnam War. This chapter, by James Paasche, demonstrates that the production of state and military propaganda required constant negotiations of control between military commanders and the soldiers and media makers on the ground. Further, this chapter attends to the labor practices of an institutional filmmaking unit in the hopes of delineating how the processes of media production must adapt to the fraught contexts of war. In addition, the chapter considers how image making was considered a key component of the U.S. military’s supposed technological superiority during the Vietnam War.