On the Cover: Cold War Imagery and the History of Technology

While radio was central to Cold War conflicts between Western democracies and communist regimes, it largely escaped the period's familiar visual iconography due to the medium's acoustic and clandestine nature. This essay examines over two hundred photographs from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that document the interaction between employees and technical equipment. It argues that images of the "radio war" require analysis on two levels: reconstructing their producers' rhetorical strategies and reading visual details that reveal unintended meanings, particularly the technological constraints shaping daily practice. In this way, a photograph capturing the process of radio technical monitoring on this issue's cover becomes a point of departure for historical inquiry at the intersection of technology, politics, and sound.