The corporate eye: Photography and the rationalization of American culture, 1884--1929.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation explores managers' instrumental uses of photography to rationalize spheres of production, distribution, and consumption in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I look at the intersections among the rationalization of work, the standardization of modern consumer culture, and the emergence of photography as a mass technology in order to understand how business and industry harnessed photographic meaning to naturalize corporate and industrial relations. Chapter One examines the turn to photographic technologies as a means of making industrial production more efficient during the Progressive era. After a brief discussion of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Eadweard Muybridge, I discuss industrial consultants Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who photographed and filmed industrial workers in order to isolate individual movements, which could then be reconfigured to model the “one best way” to perform a given task.
Chapter Two considers the work of an early personnel consultant, Dr. Katherine Blackford who used the still photograph as a means of selecting appropriate employees for a variety of vocations. A popularizer of classical and modern scientific assumptions concerning the relationship between external features and character, Blackford's substantial influence was challenged, and eventually displaced, by the competing claims of university-trained applied psychologists. In Chapter Three I turn to advertising photography to understand the rationalization of consumption. The major figure here is Lejaren`a Hiller, a photographic illustrator who invented photographic illustration for print advertising in its modern form. While corporate managers, psychologists and advertisers were moving from a model of “rational” man to “irrational woman,” or a consumer motivated by emotional appeals, Hiller created complex social tableaux, softening photography's realist edge with pictorialist sophistication.
My argument throughout is that corporate managers relied upon photography as neutral reporter of transparent social truths in a variety of instrumental applications, ranging from motion study, to employee selection, to advertising. The goal uniting these various forms of photographic production was the increased rationalization of the modern economy through a set of interlocking managerial innovations, technologies which sought to redesign not only industrial production, but the modern subject as well.