Feeling

Abstract

This chapter examines the emotional effects of doing photography. It applies recent approaches in the history of emotions, developed by Monique Scheer among others, which understand emotions as practices: something that we do rather than something that we own. Following this perspective, this chapter identifies the uses of photography that provoked emotional reactions in photographers, viewers, and photographed people. The study of several amateur albums reveals that actions such as posing for photographs, portraying friends while cooking and compiling albums were emotional practices which resulted in the creation or reinforcement of affective bonds between people involved in the photographic act and the domestication of the war surroundings, turning the hostile environment of the trenches into a home. Similarly, this chapter examines SPA photography from an emotional point of view. Focusing on SPA’s propagandistic purpose, it demonstrates that emotions were central to SPA propaganda, and that photography became a key propagandistic tool. The Press Office realised in 1915 that images alone were not able to convey the messages that the French government wanted to disseminate, as different audiences read images differently. As a result, the SPA started to tailor images to particular national audiences and to distribute photographs in several formats such as photo albums, exhibitions, prints and postcards. The adaptation of photographic images and materials to particular viewers became, thus, the main mechanism through which the SPA achieved the emotional mobilisation of France.