UD art history scholar Jason Hill explores 20th century press photography and police radio technology

Jason Hill, associate professor of art history, spent the 2024–25 academic year as the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art, where he conducted foundational research for his upcoming book on the historical convergence of mass media and law enforcement.

In residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Hill examined how the simultaneous rise of modern press photography and police radio systems between the 1920s and 1950s helped "conjure" the criminalized subjects of the American 20th century. By analyzing archives ranging from Harlem’s The People’s Voice to the Works Progress Administration (WPA)-era Index of American Design, Hill’s project traces the technological evolution of policing from colonial-era wooden rattles to the sophisticated sonic and optical assemblages that define the modern image of law and order.

Hill considered dimensions of this historical and technological conjuncture, especially its precedents and aftermaths. At the Library of Congress, he studied old editions of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s mid-century Harlem newspaper, The People’s Voice.

Its reporters privileged the testimony of neighbors over that of police dispatchers, giving readers an alternate point of view. In its crusade against police brutality, the paper also used the slower media of cartooning and illustration to counteract the quick, representational violence of photography used by outlets like the New York Daily News. 

He surveyed the photographic archives of The Washington Star in the People’s Archive at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, the central location of the DC Public Library system. He found the archives rich with evidence of the daily newspaper’s photographic obsession with the technologies of police media.

At the National Gallery, Hill examined an unexpected concentration of research within the Index of American Design regarding the "police rattle"—a proto-radiophonic tool used to summon both officers and onlookers. During the WPA era, director Holger Cahill and a team of artists documented four of these rattles across three cities, elevating them as significant artifacts of American craft history.

According to Hill, these objects anticipated the eventual convergence of police radio and press photography. Endlessly remediated through watercolor, photography and newspaper halftone, these rattles functioned as complex technological assemblages. They served as noisemakers for citizens, signalers for the colonial night watch to command lighting and martial tools used by police to bludgeon those deemed deviant.

For a fuller account, see Hill’s report on the National Gallery of Art website.