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Technology and Culture 45.1 (2004) 120-122


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Present at the Creation
Ford Highland Park Plant, 1914

Marc Greuther

We are looking into an office in the Ford Motor Company's Highland Park plant. The year is 1914—either March or February if you believe the calendars, likely March the twenty-third if the date that some unknown hand added to an early print in the Benson Ford Research Center is correct. This photograph first appeared in the May 1914 issue of Engineering Magazine, as part of Horace Arnold's "Ford Methods and The Ford Shops." The image, one of many employed by Arnold to support his narrative, joined a multitude of ground plans, floor layouts, flow diagrams, and reproductions of clerical materials. Neither the caption nor the article identified the men in the office by name; the piece, essentially technical, simply cited their functions.

The vast choreography of men and machines that made up the Highland Park enterprise was formulated by men in this photograph. Seated left to right are Charles Sorensen, P. E. Martin, and William King; standing are Clarence Avery, Harry Hickey, Gus Degener, and William Hartner. All fix their eyes on the camera—on us. They sit and stand amid of a kind of purposeful clutter, their expressions and poses conveying confidence, eagerness, concern, a touch of impatience. There is a pronounced emotional immediacy, a directness that disarms, as if we are being questioned, stared down. But then, as swiftly as the connection is made, distance intervenes. We register other details and push the scene back; this is another era, an era of candlestick telephones, inkwells, watch chains—their era, not ours.

This tension between tangible presence and unbridgeable distance is nothing new in portraiture. It is there in the frescoed gaze looking right into you across the centuries, in the long-gone relative's knowing smile from a curled snapshot. Strange, however, that it should happen here, in a hurried photograph made for an engineering journal. Strange that such an essentially documentary exercise should also be such a masterful work of portraiture. [End Page 120]


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
Ford Motor Company Highland Park plant, March 1914. (Benson Ford Research Center, the Henry Ford, Dearborn, Michigan, neg. 833.697. Reproduced with permission.)

[End Page 121]

The poses of the men in the picture exude power, success, ambition, subordination—an uneasy combination of formality, repose, and potential action, made touchier by the scene's asymmetry. But the composition reins it all in. The eye is drawn sharply into the room by the receding perspective, then pauses at the crossways partition; the upper portions of the run of offices beyond the half-height wall remain in view, creating a sense of greater depth. The deeper shadows of the receding ceiling, top right, offset the brightness of the overexposed papers in the lower-left foreground. The empty section of floor at bottom right offers relief from the close grouping of the men and the mass of material in the office; the fortuitously open windows on the left promise space beyond the office's confines. While the men form a core group, their relative positions prevent the viewer from quickly scanning across or around them, so the eye is more inclined to pause at each individual face. Whether any of this resulted from the deliberate marshalling of compositional strategies seems irrelevant. Somehow this convergence between a hurried photographer and a formidable group has captured the essence of these men and their environment; somehow we are drawn in and scrutinized.

It is a paradoxical image—unsteady but balanced, stationary but dynamic—and it reflects further paradoxes. Consider the office itself. The air of calm is utterly deceptive. Just beyond the right-hand partition was the machine shop's punch-press department; to the left, in the passageway between the office and the jig-fixture storage room, ran an overhead monorail system ferrying matériel throughout the plant. The office, in other words, is completely surrounded by working machinery—and has itself been invaded...

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