Catania, Sicily, September 1943: an OWI photograph of townspeople at an Allied news display

An Office of War Information photograph by Nick Parrino, dated September 1943, shows people in Catania, Sicily, reading a pillar of Allied news photographs set above U.S. and British flags, with a poster headed La Liberta in a window behind them (LC-USW3-039937-E).

What the photograph shows

A group of Sicilians stands at a display pillar in Catania. The pillar is covered with Allied news photographs, and U.S. and British flags hang beneath them. Through a window behind the group a poster is visible. Its heading is the only words the archive could read clearly.

LA LIBERTA

[illegible — captions beneath the photographs pinned to the display pillar]

The captions under the pinned photographs are too small to read in the service copy, so what the news said is not on the record.

Two layers of publicity

There are two pieces of persuasion here, and they had different audiences. The display itself was for the people of Catania; the archive credits it to the Allied Psychological Warfare Branch and lists the audience as enemy civilians. The photograph of the display was made by Nick Parrino for the U.S. Office of War Information, and it now sits in the FSA/OWI collection at the Library of Congress.

The archive quotes the official caption: the news mattered to these readers because it "had been denied them during the Fascist years." It then makes the point that matters most. The photograph was itself made for Allied publicity. A picture of people reading Allied news is a claim about how welcome that news was, and the caption makes that claim in words.

How to read it

The archive tags transfer and card stacking. The flags lend the news their authority, and the framing chooses an attentive crowd to stand for a city. Neither tag makes the scene false. If the caption is right that this news had been kept from them, these readers had good reason to stop and look.

The fair reading keeps both points in view. A free flow of news to people who had been denied it was a real good, and the Allies were right to say so. The pictures on the pillar were still chosen by the Allied side, and the photograph of the crowd was made as Allied publicity in its own right. Other psychological-warfare work on this site includes Leaflet 18-J-1 and the 1945 Allied might sheet. The OWI domestic branch case study covers the office's work at home, and the Office of War Information hub covers the agency as a whole.