The Critical Eye: Reading Commercial Photography

Thirty years ago, Marsha Peters and Bernard Mergen delivered a call to action in the pages of American Quarterly, urging readers to reconsider the use of photographs in American studies.¹ The authors identified a lamentable tendency in the field to either neglect the social and cultural importance of photographic images or view them simply as decorations for historical writing. Photographs, they explained, contain valuable information not found in written records, information that "can only be communicated and analyzed in visual terms."² Scholars must therefore learn to interpret the particular "grammar and syntax," or visual rhetoric, of a photograph and then locate its creation and consumption in the history of photography as well as in America's social and cultural history. The much-neglected genre of commercial photography is ideal for interpretation, Peters and Mergen went on to argue, given the mass-cultural importance and sheer volume of public photographs commissioned by government agencies, corporations, and other institutions. The publication in 2005 of Elspeth H. Brown's The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929, in the wake of vigorous scholarly activity concerning American visual culture of this period, shows us that their proposed use and method of interpreting commercial photographs has increasingly been adopted by scholars in American studies.³ It also teaches us that new questions about photography, unanticipated by proponents of visual analysis thirty years ago, are now being asked in this field.

The subject of Brown's study is the important role that commercial photography played during America's second industrial revolution, as corporate managers, engineers, planners, consultants, art directors, and merchandisers attempted to standardize subjectivities in the industrial workplace and marketplace. Brown shows us how this new class of professionals used the camera to screen employees, record the movements of workers' bodies, articulate corporate-public relations, and advertise commercial products. Through their experiments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she argues, these actors articulated a utopian vision in American corporate culture, one that saw "instrumental technologies" like photography as a means of increasing the efficiency of industrial production and mass consumption.

The product of impressive archival research, The Corporate Eye brings together a vast and varied body of primary sources, both visual and written, from important American collections of photography and labor history, including the Hagley Museum and Library (which assisted in the publication of the book), the George Eastman House, the Getty Research Institute, and the National Museum of American History. In narrating the intersection of commercial photography and industrialization in modern American culture, Brown puts into practice the advice of Peters and Mergen, mobilizing textual evidence from professional photographic and scientific literature, corporate publications, popular home journals, and fashion magazines. These sources converse with one another in Brown's study—as they did, she argues, in the historical moment of their authorship—by reinforcing and at times challenging each others' views on the best means to rationalize American industry. As the focus of both The Corporate Eye and the corporate strategies it explores, commercial photographs also emerge in the book as an "important evidentiary tool" and a privileged site of knowledge about industrial labor and consumption.

In the first half of the book, Brown examines the commercial photographs produced by prominent personnel consultants and efficiency experts in the industrial workplace. She begins with a discussion of the "everyday" portraits that Dr. Katherine Blackford used to analyze workers' characters and illustrate her employee-screening methods in the 1910s and 1920s, along with the scientific photographs that industrial psychologists used to refute Blackford's physiognomic readings. Brown goes on to consider Frank and Lillian Gilbreth's efforts to capture traces of laboring bodies in still and moving images, which they produced as models for increasing worker efficiency. The second half of the book deals with examples of commercial camera work that brought together the conventions of advertising, journalistic, social documentary, fine art, and vernacular photography on the...