ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the photographic representation of postwar cities in popular weekly photo-magazines was bound up with developing notions of a community of Western European nations. It looks at the images offered to viewers of city spaces transformed into objects of wonder by the gaze of the camera and the poetic allusions of the caption, as well as the promotion of amateur photography as a leisure activity. The promotion of emotional communities crossing national boundaries through the circulation in postwar photo-magazines of spectacular urban imagery will be examined. While urban spectacles offered consumers of photo-magazines the pleasures of escapism in a time of hardship, they also contributed to co-constitutive construction of city images. Thus, voyeurism and escapism in urban fashion photographs of the postwar illustrated press with its trade in and co-constitutive construction of city images are intimately interconnected in offering viewers membership of hopeful, forward-looking postwar emotional communities spanning national boundaries.
