The Uses of Photography: Instilling "Confidence in Corporate America"

Interior of packing house, ca. 1933. California Fruit Growers Exchange. (Photographer unknown )

This image is from the Industrial Life Photograph Collection at the Baker Library at Harvard Business School. A friend called my attention to their web page. Here is the introductory statement:

In the 1930s Harvard Business School colleagues Donald Davenport and Frank Ayres contacted leading businesses and requested photographs for classroom instruction—images Davenport hoped would “reveal the courage, industry and intelligence required of the American working man.” They amassed more than 2,100 photographs, from strangely beautiful views of men operating Midvale Steel’s 9,000-ton hydraulic press to women assembling tiny, delicate parts of Philco radios. Now students, and America’s aspiring corporate managers, had visual data to study “the human factor,” the interaction of worker and machine.

But the pictures were more than documentary records. They were the work of artists such as Margaret Bourke-White, Lewis Hine, and others, who produced highly stylized images meant to instill confidence in corporate America. Created in the years between the world wars, the Industrial Life Photograph Collection reveals the colliding—and sometimes competing—messages of art and industry, education and public relations, humanity and modernization."

It will seem clear to nearly anyone who has worked an industrial job that the images in this collection, while often striking, are more or less pure propaganda. While Davenport and Ayres may well have wanted to amass a set of images as a sort of encomium to "the American working man," a couple of things seem clear. First, they were interested in the individual worker and not "workers" as a collective entity, organized for economic and political struggle. Second, they were soliciting images from folks who had an interest in sanitizing work and working conditions. as the web page goes on to state: "Publicity departments responding to the Business Historical Society’s request for photographs typically sent a generous series of images that conveyed a persuasive story of corporate success."

This is an instance where photographs afford a poor substitute for actual experience. Instead of showing future business managers pictures of manual labor, the folks at Harvard Business School might have better served their charges by sending them off to work on the shop floor themselves.