Visualizing Labor and Commerce

In the 1950s, when I was a small child, my father worked for the Ford Motor Company and later American Machine and Foundry (AMF). Official annual reports appeared around the house and while I skipped the boring charts and graphs, I liked the bright pictures of cars coming off assembly lines and of sports equipment. Sober corporate executive portraits resembled bust-length obituary photos. Though uninteresting in their sameness, my father echoed their formality when he left for work in the morning in his gray flannel suit. Forty-five years later, an old friend from graduate school, now a division head for G.E., sent me some similar publicity. A large-scale portfolio, its operating reports remained separate from full-page, beautifully designed portraits of products and confident division heads in various scenarios. My friend, for example, leaned against a jet engine (photo-shopped in behind him), smiling directly at the viewer. He assumed a relaxed, arms-crossed pose, dressed as if for casual corporate Friday: khakis, the blue blazer, and an open-collared white shirt. As a scholar of visual culture, I flashed back to the earlier memory and marveled at the changes in corporate public relations, not to mention photographic technologies. My historical side wondered about the institutional demands and cultural processes entailed in these transformations. In short, what was the relation over time between corporate and visual culture?

Fortunately we have Elspeth H. Brown's insightful book to help with the earlier decades of this story. Her study brings together two important emerging practices in America's second Industrial Revolution: corporate rationalization and commercial photography. She charts their development as industry and business drew on photography to both legitimize and even naturalize their new systems of efficiency and marketing. During these years, as Brown writes in her careful introduction, photographic and business partners joined forces as "technocratic utopians" (p. 22). These players—from efficiency experts to industrial psychologists, public relations managers, engineers, and photographers—believed in the problem-solving capabilities of science and system and in their own privileged expertise. And while they also believed, the author suggests, in "the realist promise of the photograph to anchor truth claims about individual character and efficiency through the analysis of workers' subjectivities, both corporeal and psychological," they were far less attuned to the historically mediating workings of photography and the resulting period biases in their projects (p. 4). In Brown's careful readings, the premises of industrial photography were deeply lodged in the racial, class, and gender politics of science and work at this time. But photography became nonetheless a major device in an emerging toolkit for many of these players as they tackled the new fields of motion study, industrial psychology, and public relations, all of which served the newly efficient and managed world of the industrial corporation. And in the national boosterism for corporate efficiency, it did not always matter how actual improvements in production or labor might be put to the test; it counted instead that managers could "promise the efficient rationalization of American economic life" (p. 3). Photographic truth telling could make such a claim and fulfill such a promise. Moreover, as Brown ultimately argues, "Photographic representation has been central . . . to the ways in which corporate managers have sought to secure the consent of workers, managers, and consumers to the unevenly successful project of rationalizing American capitalism" (p. 16).

Brown's book satisfies in its content, its methodological and interpretive prowess, its address to multiple audiences, and its ambition. As I take these up, I should say that I belong to the visual culture wing of her audience as a historian of U.S. art. But I was constantly aware of her movement between historiographical traditions on all fronts, and the care with which she placed herself and her materials within each one. I begin by laying out her book's structure because much of her argument resides in the developments in the long...