Photo economics.

THE CORPORATE EYE: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF AMERICAN COMMERCIAL CULTURE, 1884-1929

BY ELSPETH H. BROWN

BALTIMORE: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005

344 PP./$49.95 (HB)

The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalizatoin of American Commercial Culture is an engaging cultural study in which author Elspeth H. Brown examines how American business adopted and utilized photography in the early twentieth century. Through four compelling case studies, Brown describes how industrial psychologists, efficiency experts, corporate managers, and advertising agents used photography to advance corporate agendas. The book argues that, although the common belief was that photography would increase the bottom line by improving business systems, in practice, photography's importance was greater in public relations than in production efficiencies. Photography helped usher in the rationalization of American business and define an identity for the American corporation in the modern era.

In her first case study, Brown analyzes the work of Dr. Katherine Blackford, one of the first personnel consultants, who used still photographs to teach "character-reading" to hiring managers. Blackford began her work for large corporations in 1912, spurred by the need of companies to reduce employee turnover. Though her theories were shaped by contemporary ideas of race, such as eugenics, they were also based on much older ideas, such as phrenology and anthropometry. What was consistent in Blackford's thoughts (and those of other professional vocational experts) was belief in the close relationship between physiognomic features and mental characteristics. Such beliefs are completely discredited today, but they had great power in the early twentieth century due to their scientific wrapping. As it became clear that there was no relationship between appearance and character, the role of photography shifted from a perceived mapping of character to capturing individuals' emotions and expressions.

Brown's second case study focuses on the work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. Frank was a building contractor turned "efficiency expert" and Lillian was a PhD in applied management. Brown details how they incorporated visual technologies into their business consulting. The Gilbreths greatest interest was in standardizing motions of work, first in photographically illustrated charts and later through studying motion pictures and "chronophotographs." As the Gilbreths developed their ideas, they moved from using photographs as illustrations of efficient movement to an "instrumental realism" that used "the realist promise of the photograph as truth to restructure the ways in which work is performed" (71). In their 1912 work for the New England Butt Company, two clocks included in the frame of a motion picture allowed the motion analysts to calculate times to the thousandth of a minute for each discrete motion. A commission the next year produced the "cyclegraph," in which small electric lights attached to a worker's hand or other moving parts could be recorded as lines of motion in the photograph. The lights were soon replaced with pulsing light, and the flashes were inscribed on the photograph as dotted lines. Gilbreth called such experiments "chronocyclegraphs" because they encoded time as well as motion and could be used, for example, to trace the motions of female handkerchief folders in the New Jersey firm of Hermann, Aukam and Company.

This use of visual technology in efficiency studies distinguished the work of the Gilbreths from other followers of Fredrick Winslow Taylor. The Gilbreth's claimed originality in approach, never publicly acknowledging work by scientific forerunners such as Etienne-Jules Marey or Jules Amar. Did the use of photography add measurably to the analysis they provided their clients? Brown is skeptical, arguing that the bells and whistles provided by the Gilbreths functioned mostly as promotional publicity for their services. After World War I, Frank sought recognition for his work among the general public. He published sporting images of fencing, golf, and even a motion study of the New York Giants. In perhaps the most puzzling application of his photographic studies, he invented workplace accommodations for war veterans who had lost a limb by staging photographs of laborers with able bodies simulating a handicap.

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Brown brings a nuanced reading to the politics of the Gilbreths' enterprise. She sees the couple as both corporate enforcers and Progressive reformers. In one respect, "Once Gilbreth had divorced labor from those who performed it, the motions made by workers could be objectified, analyzed, and standardized as simply another variable in the labor process" (73). However, efficiency could bring higher wages and shorter workdays. Gilbreth is seen as clearly within the Progressive Era reform movement, in which "technocratic utopians" believed that "science and system could solve the myriad problems of inefficiency, inequality, and poverty that plagued the United States' transition to urbanization" (22). Waste in labor was seen as analogous to waste of natural resources.

In the third chapter, Brown examines Lewis Hine's postwar "work portraits." Unlike his much better known studies of child labor, the work portraits present "a more utopian portrayal of 1920s labor-management relations," which was valued by corporations "seeking to build employee loyalty" (129). Brown details Hine's relationship with public relations expert Ivy Lee, which led to the photographer's work for several corporate magazines such as Western Electric News--a publication read by sixty thousand employees. Photography added the human touch to the corporation, commending the skill of individual workers and providing news of their families at home or on vacation, and in effect diminishing potential labor-management conflicts while increasing job satisfaction and building trust between the parties. As Brown notes, Hine's corporate work portraits may be more visually sophisticated but are nearly indistinguishable from other corporate public relations photographs of the period. The key issue of this work, as Brown notes, is that it represented the legacy of the Progressive movement in the pro-business 1920s, in which liberals accepted the corporation as a fact of modern life, but advocated for government regulation against potential excesses.

In her fourth case study, Brown turns to photography's role in the rationalization of consumption through investigation of the work of Lejaren a Hiller, who developed some of the earliest photographically illustrated advertising campaigns in the new nationally distributed magazines. At the turn of the twentieth century, there were only a few photographs used in advertising, usually tiny images located in the back of magazines. By the second decade of the century, Brown argues, some advertisers wanted to replace drawn illustrations with narrative photographs that could tell a story. Hiller had recently arrived in New York after training in commercial art in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and fine art in Chicago. He supported himself as an illustrator, often drawing from photographs. In 1913 he made a splash when he convinced one of his clients to allow him to illustrate a mystery story with photographs. Soon, he had a number of advertising commissions, and was recognized for a narrative style in which his pictorialist figures acted in elaborate theatrical sets. Hiller was a key figure in commercial art; he was vice president and photographic director of the prominent photographic firm Underwood & Underwood by 1924, and remained active in the profession until the 1950s. Brown sees the significance of Hiller's work (as well as Hine's corporate work) as a "new emphasis on the subjective and the emotional as a key element of rationalization" that used photography to represent "utopian claims of a meaningful work environment or a transformational consumer product," even if it was not accessible to most Americans (216).

Brown's primary argument is that photography was instrumental in shaping American corporate identity and process in the decade prior to World War I. This work continued throughout the 1920s, forming a prehistory for the better known visual culture of the 1930s, which included, for example, the documentary work sponsored by the Farm Security Administration. The importance of Brown's methodology for visual culture studies is that it locates photographs firmly in their historical contexts. This book describes the uses of photography within the development of corporate structures, labor history, and the shifting definition of liberalism in the twentieth century. By emphasizing the historical rather than the formal or stylistic, Brown's work exemplifies a fresh type of visual culture study that pays careful attention to meanings in specific contexts. It is not meant to replace histories of artistic style but rather to complement them by providing another layer of interpretation. This highly readable, interdisciplinary book provides insights into both the history of American economic development and the history of photography.

PATRICIA JOHNSTON is a professor of art history at Salem State College in Salem, Massachusetts. She is the editor of Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, forthcoming from University of California Press.