ABSTRACT
In the concluding years of the Second World War, as Allied Forces gained ground in both Europe and the Pacific, the US Navy re-enlisted Edward Steichen, one of the world's most famous photographers, to develop a comprehensive image-based public relations campaign. The US Navy needed to recruit more fighter pilots, but it also wanted to convince the American public of its success against Japanese forces in the Pacific. Bringing together a small group of professional photographers – Charles Kerlee, Horace Bristol, Wayne Miller, Charles Fenno Jacobs, Victor Jorgensen and Dwight Long – Steichen spearheaded the Naval Aviation Photography Unit (NAPU) which provided epic battle images from air and sea, but also documented American forces ‘at ease’ in the tropics as they sunbathed, swam, drank and relaxed. 1 Steichen, by now a lieutenant commander, oversaw the entire NAPU project by developing, choosing and editing the images himself, and providing captions for their reproduction in popular American newspapers and magazines such as LIFE. Under his leadership, selected NAPU images were displayed at the famous Power in the Pacific exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1945, and distributed in the popular U.S. Navy War Photographs memorial book that sold over 6 million copies in the year after peace was declared. 2
