Jason E. Hill is a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Southern California, where his dissertation considers the art and photography of PM. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS, the Terra Foundation, and the Swann Foundation. In June 1940, the progressive New York City tabloid PM published an image from the Soviet/German front that had just been transmitted by radio from Moscow to New York. The wartime exigencies of communications across Europe and the primitive state of the radiophoto technology at the time of transmission combined to produce in this image a striking hybridity, manifest in its status as both photographic and, because visibly retouched, handmade. Activating the very inability to identify its medium, PM deployed this image as a component within its larger project of challenging the prevailing, and often dubious, journalistic discourse of photographic objectivity. In PM’s pages, this radiophoto was shown to function not as objective reportage, but rather as merely another gambit in the wartime photojournalistic contest of credibility
