How did you find the military archive that you have been working with during your projects Better Food For Our Fighting Men and Fashion Army?

Actually, my interest is not the military. But today it's very current to investigate the topic of the military. Here in Arles, there are three or four shows that deal with this. The way I got to this archive I am working with is much more simple. I collect food iconography from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. I collect printed materials and things I call “accidental photo books” and are actually photography illustrated instruction manuals from the same era. Two years ago I decided to shift my approach a bit and I started to look for food photography in public domain online databases. I was interested in the survivalist movement and all those guys who taste and test military rations and survival kits. So I started digging into forums and blogs talking about this – and I found guys who were exchanging their experiences with military rations. After that I started looking for photography about military food and rations. I found several images and then the source of this image corpus that have been given to the public domain from the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center from Boston. While I was digging this archive for a project I found thousands of images of people posing with prototypes of outfits and uniforms. So this is how Fashion Army started. 

In 2022 I created a book from the same archive very rapidly, titled Better Food For Our Fighting Men. I tried to be quick with it because the images had not circulated before as they were just released into the public domain. So the Fashion Army exhibition – and the book that is underway – is the second chapter to this project.

Do you think the fact that these are military photographs adds another layer to looking at them from a contemporary perspective?

Definitely. Since 2022, in Europe we've realised that war did not disappear, and the high-intensity conflicts are still part of our reality. And they will be here as long as humanity exists. We’ve been talking about wars for the last two years, and we don’t know what will happen in Ukraine or the Gaza strip. Showing these military images today allows me to ask some questions. But I’m not an academic or a specialist in the topic, I’m a picture editor. So I would love to recirculate these images. They are well produced – they were shot between the end of the ‘60s and beginning of the ‘90s but they still seem modern regarding the looks, fits and the photographic style. So if you are a fashion editor and see these images today you still think they are incredible. But you also feel bad somehow, because they were created by the most powerful army in the world, whose aim is just to impose the ideology and capitalist interests of the United States on the world.

How much do you know about the background and original context of these photographs?

This is interesting. When I found these images first I started to work on my food photography project. But at the same time, I started contacting the military and the centre for a good year and a half. I wrote to them almost every month and never got any answer. But as soon as my Better Food For Our Fighting Men book was published, and my exhibition from the same material was touring in Italy, Bulgaria and France they finally answered me. From their email I could see that they did some kind of research about me and they saw the positive reviews about the exhibition and the book. They said: “All right Matthieu, we saw you did a book. So now you're contacting us for something else. What do you need?” I was so happy they answered, I replied with a list of questions about their archive. From these email exchanges I could figure out that the archive has just been released – and the only data they have besides the negatives are a few keywords for each image and the date of shootings. Many of the keywords were acronyms that I couldn’t understand. I asked them if they had released everything, if these were clothing prototypes for the army, if they actually equipped the US Army with these clothes, what do the acronyms mean, and all kinds of questions. I also asked if I could have someone working with the archive answer all these questions. They said they can not do another round of questions, but if I want my answers I have to send another query to another service of theirs. So I sent it to New York, to someone else. They answered quite rapidly and made me sign a memorandum allowing me to ask questions from the media representative of the centre. After I signed it, they stopped answering. Three months later I received an email saying that they do not have the resources to answer me, but as I have the images and they are copyright free I can do whatever I want with them. This whole story means that there are a lot of unknowns about and around these images. This is why I decided to have this iconographic focus and artistic approach for the Fashion Army exhibition.

What I know for sure is that the models in these photographs are not professionals. And what I assume is that the photographs were produced for documenting their work for internal reasons in the army. During the project I talked to someone at the military who said to me: “these images are internal, but don’t forget that in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s the US Army is a society within society. You have hundreds if not millions of people working for the army, it’s a whole industry.” And so these images were not produced for the general public – that's for sure, because I spent two years searching for any trace of circulation of the photographs. They were for internal army use – the centre providing the images was working for all the branches of the army: the Navy, the Infantry, the Air Force and so on. My belief is that they were shooting these prototypes to maybe send them out to their different branches for approval.

You mentioned that there is a book coming at the end of July published by MACK books showcasing the same archive as the exhibition. Could you tell me more about this book?

The book is not the catalogue of the exhibition, so the edit I created from the archive is quite different.

In the show we have 150 prints, but in the book we have 350, so more than double of the exhibited material. The attitude of the exhibition and the book is also quite different because we created the book as a reference book, a lookbook, or some kind of fashion magazine for stylists – compared to the photographic exhibition we have on view in Arles. So for the book we got the inspiration from fashion magazines: glossy paper, soft cover, and full page images. It will be a catalogue of styles with three texts. One of these texts is about where the images come from, one is by me about my approach to these images and the third one is by renowned fashion critic Angelo Flaccavento who writes about the notion of form and function, the functionalism of these clothes and images, and the interplay between military functionality and the fashion industry.