Gospel of the Marseille Docker - Nicholas Derybolsky from 1952

This text, accompanied by a ‘gospel’ that I made by montaging the US-recorded captions, is an attempt for re-narrating Marshall Plan’s discourse on the working class, aka the so-called ‘free labor’ of the US against the ‘communist labor’ of the “Soviet threat.” I use gospel writing as a form of critical analysis to unearth the US doctrine on the ‘good life’ of the postwar labor. My purpose is to deconstruct how the postwar economy-political and cultural imperialism of the US was embodied in time, space, body, and mind of the postwar labor reporting from her ‘peacetime’ operational field by hiring ‘independent’ reporters of the war front. On the one hand, the article attempts a forensic analysis of the US-narrated postwar documentary photography and journalism; and on the other, it aims to reveal the extent of the Cold War US practice to disseminate its anti-communist ideology on postwar labor from text to image, from time to space, and from body to mind. Visual and textual records of photographs taken in Marseille in 1952 after the official ending of the Marshall Plan , are the primary source of data analyzed in this text. This data itself serve as critique and counter-argument to reveal the postwar ‘soft power’ discourse and practice of the US in Marshall Plan countries. Yet, this text is not about visuality or photography, it is rather about textuality and text, i.e., about textual records accompanying photographs for filing and publicizing the Marshall Plan in the ‘soft’ war front and home front. For this purpose, it uses captions, referred as “picture stories” by the NARA, as evidence instead of photographs of Haas, and analyzes captions as a means of historiographical practice for deconstruction of the publicized and archived discourse of the US postwar ideology. The ‘gospel’ of the Marseille Docker - Nicholas Derybolsky from 1952, as I made and entitled, is a collage composed of these “picture stories” dating May 7th, 1952. The captions, written either for record descriptions or as propaganda guides to accompany the photos of Haas guide the decoupling. I analyze repetitive words and word groups that appear in the captions, and via rhythmic deconstruction of these, I form figurative statements in order to re-narrate the Marshall Plan’s discourse on the ‘free labor’ over the original “picture stories.” In the end, it is not the image or photo-essay but the text - caption, picture story or gospel - which tells again and again in different statements, the good day of a ‘typical Marseille docker’ of the Marshall Plan.