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

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their living room but rather in a fallout shelter. The past---including the Depression, the Second World War, and the Cold War---have created a psychological environment in which nothing can be certain about the future. The past and its uncertainties forced the young postwar family to seek security in the home, and in the fallout shelter, but that family found it impossible to leave those uncertainties outside the home. If there is one factor which dominated the family of this era, then, it is ambivalence---with respect to the present, the future, and the family as repository of hopes and identities. This ambivalence is seen in the faces of the family in the photograph on the book's cover. These people have apparently everything the world can offer them. They have material abundance. They are able to take advantage of modern technology to make their lives comfortable and convenient. They have themselves as members of a tightly-knit family. But they have brought into that home a psychological reality which darkens all their abundance and hope. They are trapped in the very place which offers them refuge from the threatening external world. They are also trapped in the gender roles they created to give them their identities. They

Category: Arts - A