Eyes on Labor: News Photography and America’s Working Class by Carol Quirke (review)

In the scholarship on the history of photography, the most overlooked genre is the news photograph, even though it is the genre most heavily consumed. Seemingly straightforward, these images do not call out for interpretation and analysis. They are the visual equivalent of the journalistic text, a pictorial “who, what, where, when and how.” But as Carol Quirke demonstrates in Eyes on Labor: News Photography and America’s Working Class, it is these very images that are the most susceptible to what visual culture theorists call the “myth of photographic truth,” the erroneous but widespread assumption that photographs are factual, that their makers and context creators are objective. Thus the photograph, “the central instrument of our time,” as James Agee noted in 1941, (3) is a powerful tool in the shaping of public opinion.

Focusing on US labour in the first half of the 20th century, Quirke examines the manner in which news photography increasingly intervened in public debates concerning trade unionization as it simultaneously contributed to the construction of working class identity. Her first chapter traces the public profile of organized labour as it developed in the decades before the rise of photojournalism in the 1930s, with special attention to visual representations of labourers transmitted through earlier technologies like engravings, stereographs, and halftones. Although 19th-century news outlets reported on such events as the 1877 Railroad Strike, the number of photographs published were few and often looked static or even staged. The invention of the Graflex camera in 1898 greatly increased the ease and speed with which events could be covered, and with the rise of the rotogravure and tabloid presses in the 1910s, news photographs were finally able to make some impact on the visual construction of labour relations and unionization covering, for instance, the 1909 Uprising of the Twenty Thousand, the 1911 Triangle Fire, the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, and the wave of strikes that followed World War I. Quirke analyzes in depth the “visualization of strikes” in the Mid-Week Pictorial in the latter half of 1919, arguing that the use of formal head-shots to depict corporate and government leaders conveyed a sense of order, whereas photographs of union leaders and strikers bearing rifles or being beaten or restrained by police suggested a threat to order and stability, especially accompanied by captions proposing “that labor activism led to violence.” (27) It wasn’t until the development of high-speed film and high-speed hand-held cameras like the Leica and the Speed Graphic, however, that news photography gained greater currency on a national level, abetted by New Deal experiments using photography to sway public opinion; the introduction of picture magazines, such as Life and Look; and the increasing use of photography by corporations, pro-business organizations, and labour unions in their own publications.

This first chapter sets the stage for the series of chapter-length case studies that follow, beginning with an investigation into Life’s coverage of labour unions, particularly the cio, from the magazine’s founding in 1936 to the country’s entry into World War II. Utilizing their new “photo-essay” format, the magazine privileged photographs as much as, if not more than, the written text and, as Quirke argues, for the first time brought to millions of consumers visual evidence that a vast number of American workers were fighting to unionize, countering pro-business claims that the numbers were few. However, through a careful analysis of the weekly issues published over these six years, Quirke concludes that Life’s attitude towards organized labour was a shifting and often contradictory one. Workers were at times portrayed as heroes, at others as violent agitators, a result of Life’s middle-of-the-road approach that supported the concept of unionization as long as social stability was not threatened nor business leaders demonized. After all, as Quirke points out, working-class Americans were also consumers, and thus their patronage was important to the expansion of...