Finding the right cover image for Meredith H. Lair's Armed with Abundance: Consumerism & Soldiering in the Vietnam War proved to be a long, hard road that involved much effort by the author herself. Here's Meredith to tell her story:
"The book is an attempt to unseat traditional ideas about the Vietnam War--that most soldiers served in combat, and that the typical American war experience was defined by privation and danger--by including the forgotten landscape of the Vietnam War, which was rich with comfortable living accommodations, ample entertainments, and easy access to consumer goods. This is not the usual way the Vietnam War--indeed, any war (the book's epilogue includes a lengthy discussion about similar features of the Iraq war zone)--is understood.
"Finding a cover for the book proved to be exceedingly difficult. For a book that is so visually oriented, yet controversial, it was an urgent necessity to find a striking cover image that depicted the alternative warscape I describe in the text. There were several essential criteria for the image: it had to assert that the book was about soldiers in a war zone; it had to suggest the Vietnam era; it had to depict the war-zone material abundance described in the book; it had to be visually arresting; and it had to not be one of the photos I had already paid a large sum of money to use in the interior of the book.
"There were only two journalists during the war who seriously endeavored to focus on the noncombat elements of life in the war zone, and one of them had dropped off the map; I could not find any contact information for him in order to get his permission to use one of his photos. The other's work was prominently on display in the book itself, and he didn't have an image that was quite right for the cover, plus the press really wanted something in the public domain (read: free).
"I looked at several thousand images in various commercial photo archives, but the press and I could not reach an agreement. At their suggestion, I re-contacted the Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES), which runs the military's PX (retail) system at present. I had contacted them a few years prior and had a difficult time with them, but in the interim they had hired a historian and professionalized their archives. The guy could not have been nicer, and he provided a slew of images with great potential. We settled on one, and UNC Press proceeded to print 5,000 copies of their catalog with my new cover in a full-page listing for the book.
"Some weeks later, the designers contacted the AAFES archivist about acquiring a high-resolution copy of the image for use in printing the cover itself. Apparently they also sought signature on a formal release for the photo, and the AAFES archivist ran it by their general counsel. The lawyers balked, citing privacy concerns for the soldier depicted in the image. It's a fairly close shot of a US soldier in uniform (fatigues, helmet) in a Vietnam PX surrounded by consumer goods. He is holding a can of Planter's peanuts that is conveniently obscuring the naked lady on the pornography he is buying. It is a great image--provocative, deeply suggestive of consumerism, and apparently totally off-limits.
"I disagreed with the privacy argument and even consulted a lawyer, but my editors were not interested in arguing the matter. They pulled the image from all online promotional materials of my book, and I set out anew to find an appropriate image for the cover. This time, I focused not on photographs by professional photographers, whose editors did not encourage documentation of prosaic concerns like what a soldier's hooch looked like, hence the paucity of such images. Rather, I focused on photos taken by soldiers themselves that were in digital archives or public sites like Flickr. Over the course of three days I looked at perhaps 10,000 images.
"I found many that depicted material abundance, but they all had problems: they didn't show US soldiers or they showed Vietnamese civilians, which would confuse the reader; they showed soldiers doing drugs, which might unnecessarily prejudice readers against my argument before they had even opened the book; they were not visually arresting; there was no contact information for the person who took the photograph, eliminating my ability to get both a high-resolution version of the image and the requisite permission to use it; or they were poorly lit. This latter point was one of the most frequent problems. Just because cameras were an essential purchase for American soldiers in Vietnam, did not mean that the soldiers knew how to use them!
"We eventually settled on the image that now graces the cover of my book, and in the end, I think it's the right one. As one of my colleagues pointed out, amidst my deep frustration and disappointment, the image does not literally show abundance (besides the cameras), and that's ok, because abundance is only a component of my argument. What the book is really about is how the public and Vietnam veterans regard their service in Vietnam. That sense of detachment and self-regard is evident in the way the photo came about: a soldier taking a picture of other soldiers taking pictures."
Thanks, Meredith. Phew! The twists and turns of this Cover Story are fascinating. Before I learned anything, though, this cover drew me in. The image of photographers being photographed, mirror style, is arresting. And that's what a good cover should do, right?
