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Reviews
| The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929. By Elspeth H. Brown. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 2005. viii+334 pp., illus., notes, bibl., index. $49.95 hb (ISBN 0-8018-8099-8).
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Elspeth Brown, an assistant professor of history at the University of Toronto and student of Alan Trachtenberg, has crafted a clever volume that examines how turn-of-the-century business and industry used the new technology of photography to make production (and consumption) more efficient. Against the backdrop of the dramatically expanding and changing industrial and corporate world of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, Brown seeks to understand the very different roles that photography has played in the quest for efficiency, standardization, and rationalization that characterized the second Industrial Revolution. In her own words, this book "investigates a set of questions concerning industrialization, the working body, the commercialization of subjectivity, and the role of visual culture in an emerging modern America" (p. 5).
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As this book is based on Brown's dissertation, readers may be surprised at its very ingenious organizational form. It is in reality four case studies—each deals with a different stage in the industrial process, but all are held together by the common theme of examining the role of photographic images (and their creators) in what she terms "the rationalization of commercial culture." These case studies explore how photography was used in labor selection (chap. 1), standardization and time-motion studies (chap. 2), corporate appeals to labor (chap. 3), and commercial illustration (chap. 4), respectively.
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In each of these chapters, Brown also focuses on biographical sketches of single individuals—figures whose work she sees as important and emblematic of a particular photographic technology and its relationship with the industrial sphere. The first chapter examines Dr. Katherine Blackford and her Blackford Employment Plan that promulgated a "scientific" methodology (drawing on 19th-century practices of physiognomy, phrenologists, and eugenicists) for assessing individual character traits from physical characteristics. Through a skilled reading of features, Blackford and her disciples asserted that they could assess a worker's character, "fitness," and aptitude for a particular type of work by scrutinizing his or her profile. Photography both provided important reference collections for Blackford and allowed her to read an applicant's character in absentia. The second chapter follows Frank Gilbreth's career as an industrial consultant. In particular, it examines the photographic technologies that he introduced to analyze a worker's organic movement, breaking it down into discrete, interchangeable elements that could be reordered for greater efficiency. Connected with Frederick Taylor's efforts at creating "scientific management," Gilbreth used still photography, film, time keeping, and cyclegraphs primarily to promote his scientific approach as a consultant and, secondarily, to improve worker efficiency. This chapter is, by far, the most technical and potentially of the most interest to readers who specialize in the history of technology.
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The third chapter focuses on the photographic work of Lewis W. Hine. Although Hine is well known for his photography in the service of progressive labor reform, Brown also analyzes his later (post 1919) works, which took on a more utopian tone in the portrayal of 1920s labor-management relations. This leads Brown to also examine the appearance of corporately published bulletins and employee-targeted magazines meant to "replace the public perception of the 'soul-less corporation' with that of a caring, family-oriented concern" (p. 131).
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The fourth and final case study follows the historically obscure but interesting career of Lejaren à Hiller and the emergence of modern advertising. Hiller played a pivotal role in the shift away from realist depictions of products toward more subjective images that sell "the ideal." Through a review of Hiller's work in advertising, Brown also reveals interesting facts about changes in photographic techniques and the production studios created to feed the growing need for commercial illustration.
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In each of these chapters, Brown provides readers with an enormous amount of detail and historical context (verging on a historiographic version of Geertzian "thick description"). Her work is not simply a description of these four individuals but is also solidly grounded in cultural, political, and economic history. The fact that photographic images were used to do so many and disparate tasks—to read loyalty and character in workers' faces, to evaluate the efficiency of their body mechanics, to shape worker opinion, and to stimulate consumer desire—points toward the complexity and increasing sophistication of both the art and technology of photography and the industries that deployed them.
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While this book may not directly contribute to industrial archaeology, historical archaeology, or even heritage and historic preservation literatures, it does call attention to the history of photographic technologies and their various roles in certain segments of industrial history during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. One aspect of this volume that industrial archaeologists may find admirable is that Brown's analytical focus is not on the consumers of visual media but, rather, on the producers of photographic imagery in relation to larger industrial production. Furthermore, Brown is not so much interested in changing industrial technologies or even the rationalization of American commercial culture (despite the title) as she is in the uses of photographic technologies as instruments used by industrial managers, consultants, and art directors (p. 21).
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Finally, this book is not for readers who are repulsed by jargon or cultural theory. For others, however, there is much information to be gleaned from Brown's meticulous research and rich contextualization. This reviewer sees The Corporate Eye as a welcome and imaginative addition to the history of visual technologies and commercial history.
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