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Analysis of a Photograph for a Book Cover

This study will examine the significance of the photograph on the cover of Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. The study will discuss why the photograph was likely chosen for the cover, based on what the author presents in her analysis of American cultural values in this work. The argument here will essentially be that the photograph, "Containment At Home" (1961), by Dimitri Kessel, portraying a "nuclear" family of mother, father, one son and two daughters, is meant to show certain features, qualities and values of the "typical" family of the Cold War era.

May's book begins with an account of a young American couple who "in the summer of 1959 . . . married and spent their honeymoon in a bomb shelter." The original article featuring the couple in the shelter declared that "fallout can be fun." May writes that

As the couple embarked on family life, all they had to enhance their honeymoon were consumer goods, their sexuality, and privacy. This is a powerful image of the nuclear family in the nuclear age: isolated, sexually charged, cushioned by abundance, and protected against impending doom by the wonders of modern technology (3).

The family in the photograph on the cover of May's book includes three children, showing the nuclear family in a more developed context, but the general image and message are the same. The photograph encapsulates the ideology and values of the American culture and family in the midst of the Cold War, circa 1960.

The fallout shelter can be seen in retrospect as a home-with-a-home, or a prison-within-a-home. May writes that there is a powerful "symbolic significance" to the family in the fallout shelter:

For in the early years of the cold war, amid a world of uncertainties brought on by World War II and its aftermath, the home seemed to offer a secure private nest removed from the danger of the outside world. . . However, . . . the family also seemed . . ...

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Analysis of a Photograph for a Book Cover. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 02:50, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702620.html