Framing Postwar Litter: The Photojournalism of Fenno Jacobs and Keep America Beautiful's Public Service Announcements

Abstract

This article contrasts two different constructions of public litter in the US media in the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that while American photojournalist Fenno Jacobs and the new private organization Keep America Beautiful (KAB) both created and composed images of waste in urban and suburban settings, they advanced contrasting ideological perspectives by framing litter in starkly different ways—both literally in terms of the borders of the photographic and filmic mediums, and in the figurative framing of the causes of the litter problem. By analyzing KAB's television public service announcements “Every Litter Bit Hurts” and “Susan Spotless,” I show that the organization promoted a new discourse of litter vigilance by aestheticizing the landscape and exaggerating the presence of public litter to ultimately foist sole responsibility for litter's existence on the American citizen. By contrast, Jacobs's photographs, as evidenced by his portfolio in a March 1950 issue of Fortune magazine, “A Landscape of Industry's Leavings,” instead embodied a way of seeing (and photographing) that accepted the presence of litter not as a dominant part of the landscape but in marginal and eccentric places, and implicated not only the American consumer but also American production industries. Additionally, Jacobs's approach, I argue, framed litter as an ecological problem, while KAB's focus on aesthetics obscured any environmental dimensions litter might have had by problematically suggesting waste merely belonged in the dumping grounds of America's new sanitary landfills.