Premiering July 20th at 9PM ET/ 8PM C

Drawing from an extraordinary archive of unpublished military photographs and personal correspondence, as well as expert and family interviews, Charlotte Mansfield, a Woman Photographer Goes to War tells the story of Charlotte Mansfield’s pioneering career as a Women’s Army Corps photographer during World War II. 

From Dr. Brian Graves:

I came to the project when Dr. Kurt Piehler, Director of the Florida State University Institute on World War Two and the Human Experience, requested a meeting to discuss the possibility of documentary collaboration involving the Institute's collections. Shortly after we met, I visited with Mike Kasper, the Institute's Head Archivist, to look at some of the Institute's holdings, and was immediately drawn to Mansfield's WWII scrapbooks, which contain images of WWII unlike any that I had ever seen. Not only did Mansfield have a great eye, but she captured an extraordinary glimpse into how Women's Army Corps soldiers navigated their new roles in the military.

Two of the most popular non-fiction WWII narratives of recent years, Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation” and Ken Burns’s “The War,” include no mention of WWII women’s military divisions, and a broader field of popular works on WWII has tended to reduce the role and contribution of women to “Rosie the Riveter” narratives of working women on the home front. Our film seeks to expand the popular conversation of previous historical narratives by providing an intimate and visually engaging point of view on Charlotte Mansfield’s experiences and contributions as a Women's Army Corps photographer.

The project is a collaboration involving undergraduate students in the Florida State University Digital Media Production Program, graduate students in the FSU School of Communication, and student researchers and archivists at the Florida State University Institute on World War Two and the Human Experience.