The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture 1884-1929 (review)

Living in modernity, says sociologist Anthony Giddens, means living in a 'climate of risk,' one in which in order to function and survive we must trust individuals, abstract institutions, and arcane technologies, even though we may have little or no first-hand knowledge about them. Because of its mimetic ability to record and communicate visual images with great verisimilitude, photography has been one of the more ubiquitous technologies that we trust to provide us with a modicum of security in a risky, unstable world. The identity card or passport photo, the surveillance camera, and the family album – each is a reassurance that threats to our bodies, our selves, or our memories may be eliminated or alleviated by what the camera sees or shows us. Elspeth H. Brown's The Corporate Eye is a perceptive analysis of an assortment of efforts by corporations and businesses to utilize photography as a tool that would serve their interests by reducing their risks and persuading consumers and employees to trust them. The period that she surveys, between the 1880s and 1929, saw the immense expansion of American industry, an influx of millions of immigrants, and the rise of a new class of managers, scientists, and technicians. All of these changes undermined or eliminated older means of establishing trust, such as the family connections that had united managers and entrepreneurs, or the craft and apprentice traditions that had organized workers. Thus, there was a need for a new kind of 'modern' decision-making, one based on the collection, interpretation, and filing of impersonal data in a variety of media – including photography – that could be applied to individuals in what was meant to be a rational, reliable manner.

By insisting that job applicants provide photographs of themselves, corporate managers and the psychiatrists who sought their patronage believed they could 'scientifically' select reliable employees – for example, 'forceful' ones with strong jaws who fit desirable racial stereotypes – and thus avoid hiring slackers or radicals. Influenced by recondite psychological systems such as eugenics, pathognomy, and physiognomy, which were considered objective and at least quasi-scientific at the time, employers tried to calculate applicants' innate personality traits by peering at their photographs to learn how intelligently or reliably they would perform in the workplace. Or, using photography in connection with Taylorist time-and-motion studies, Frederick Winslow Taylor's apostle Frank Gilberth sought to eliminate 'waste' motions in the work process so that employees would be more efficient, suffer less fatigue, and create a capitalist utopia of increased productivity and profitability.

Other photographs, such as Lewis Hine's portraits of skilled, adult industrial craftsmen, could be published in glossy company magazines that were part of public relations campaigns that sought to persuade workers that they were part of a paternalistic corporate team or family, rather than cogs in an industrial machine. Indeed, as Brown illustrates, some corporations took the family metaphor so seriously that they encouraged workers to contribute their vacation snapshots and baby pictures to public corporate picture albums that could be displayed in the workplace or reproduced in company publications. And of course, by the 1920s, when Brown's survey ends, art and Mammon had begun to collude, not collide, as photographers began applying the techniques of early twentieth-century aesthetic photography to advertising. Describing the career of Lejaren Hiller, an especially successful early advertising photographer, Brown shows how images that were grainy, blurry, and enhanced by lavish amounts of darkroom manipulation could be used to sell cigarettes as well as win prizes in gallery exhibitions.

With the notable exception of Hine's work images, most of the photography Brown analyses is neither technically nor aesthetically interesting or significant. However, it does serve as a useful means of gaining access to the corporate mentality of the period: a time when 'inefficiency' and 'waste' were as demonized as carbohydrates and terrorism are now, when hiring and firing were done by Personnel Departments rather...