Family Slide Show Takes A Place In History

A family’s slide show provides a unique glimpse into cold war history through a new book by UVic School of Public Administration professor John Langford. Together with his sister Martha Langford, Concordia University research chair in art history, he has co-authored A Cold War Tourist and His Camera using their father’s carousels of slides to provide a tour of the cold war through a tourist’s lens.
       In 1963, their father Warren Langford, a Second World War air force veteran and career public servant, travelled through North America, Africa and Europe as part of the National Defence College’s curriculum of cold war training. The slides―a combination of cold war images and tourist snapshots―sat in storage for decades. “The photographs taken by our father shed light on how ideology and the mass media affected our parents’ and grandparents’ views of the world in the cold war era,” says Langford.
       The brother-sister collaboration began with a panel presentation on the cold war and photography at Carleton University in 2008. “I have long had a desire to return to earlier PhD research on the cold war so it was wonderful to revisit the events I experienced as a student in the 1960s to provide context for the photographs,” says Langford.
       This unique collaboration between a political scientist and an art historian on academic treatment of a family slide show demonstrates the historical significance of tourist photography and a renewed interest in the cultural impacts of the cold war.
       A Cold War Tourist and His Camera is published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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