ABSTRACT
In the Cold War tourist’s slide show, the first glimpse of his wife is at considerable distance. Lucille Langford stands miniaturized at the entrance to Westminster Cathedral, a Roman Catholic church of Neo-Byzantine design, consecrated in 1910. The creation of the public woman remains an understudied aspect of twentieth-century geopolitics, as A Cold War Tourist and His Camera also shows. Paris, then as now, was the stuff of tourists’ dreams, but the Cold Warriors-in-training had been encouraged to think in more concrete and global terms, and specifically to seek confirmation that the Western Alliance would remain ‘effective in achieving its goal of thwarting Soviet designs’. Warren Langford had been training for months to make this kind of picture, situating his colleagues beside points of interest, such as parapets, market stalls, monuments, then backing up to take in the picturesque view: typical tourism, impeccable spycraft.
