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  • Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance by Hanna Rose Shell
  • Kristie Macrakis (bio)
Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance. By Hanna Rose Shell. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2012. Pp. 240. $32.95.

Lizards, snakes, birds, and other animals have long made themselves invisible to predators by blending into their environment through adaptive coloration. Human beings, by contrast, took some time before they began to conceal themselves from enemy hunters by blending into the environment or mimicking nature by using technology. In fact, it was not until World War I that the term "camouflage" emerged to describe the new method of hiding from enemy aerial surveillance.

Hanna Rose Shell's Hide and Seek is a highly academic and sophisticated media studies account of the subject of camouflage using an artistic perspective and historical evidence. Unlike previous books on the subject, it is neither a traditional narrative of the historical evolution of camouflage nor a static artistic representation of camouflage. Rather, it is a study of the visual and material practices of strategic concealment, ones that draws on historical examples—from the time of Darwin's Origin of Species in the nineteenth century to Monty Python in the twentieth. As a result, the book is not for beginners wishing to gain an introduction to the subject. Many readers not versed in camouflage might feel the need to consult some basic books on the subject before moving on to this advanced text.

Shell argues that "camouflage is an adaptive logic of escape from photographic representation" (dust jacket). In developing this thesis, she is building on the military establishment's World War I conception of camouflage as concealment from the newly developed aerial photographic-reconnaissance efforts. Contrary to a layperson's conception, camouflage is not simply fooling the naked eye.

The book is a series of four rather disparate case-study chapters that are linked together conceptually through what Shell calls the "static," "serial," and "dynamic" species of camouflage. Her research is based on the "material forms it has left behind—photomontages, paintings, paper blankets, stuffed rabbits, ghillie suits, and instructional films" (p. 21), and not on newly discovered archival material.

Shell opens the book with camouflage's "founding father" Abbott Thayer and his controversial Law of Protective Coloration, modeling of invisibility in both nature and man, instantaneous photography, and static camouflage. The second chapter examines serial camouflage during World War I, focusing on the material culture of netting—that is, nets used to conceal large objects or areas. The third chapter is a study of dynamic camouflage and focuses on the use of real-time film for surveillance. Finally, the fourth chapter merges the static, serial, and dynamic types of camouflage [End Page 696] into what Shell calls the "chameleonic impulse": human efforts to reproduce the color changes found in animals. In essence, Shell examines the interplay among these types of camouflage at various times, and also their interactions with new photographic technologies.

Hide and Seek is often profound and philosophical, but not straightforward. Consider these examples: camouflage "is effected through human mimicry of natural forms—mimicry, that is, in the sense of visual resemblance, rather than similitude in any ontological sense" (p. 14); Thayer "spun a vital form of seeing and knowing through making—a nascent art, science, and craft found on the performance of self-effacement" (p. 75); "Three epistemic roles of the skin can be articulated. . . . Taken together, the multiple shells or 'skins' signify a conquest over nature and a corresponding knowledge claim" (pp. 35-36); and finally, "In a logistical and tactical, as well as metaphorical sense, netting seeded itself into the emulsive space both within and between the photographic frames" (p. 120).

The book does have its lighter moments, however. It opens with an image of a "sniper in grass"; but the sniper is nowhere to be found. It is not clear whether the sniper is there or not. Unlike other World War I instructional images, there are no "before" and "after" images here, no sniper popping out of the grass in the second image. Shell uses this image of the sniper to argue that the logic of...

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