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9780801889707 Academic Inspection Copy

The Corporate Eye

Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929
  • ISBN-13: 9780801889707
  • Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
    Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
  • By Elspeth H. Brown
  • Price: AUD $73.99
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 14/05/2008
  • Format: Paperback 348 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Economics [KC]
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In the late nineteenth century, corporate managers began to rely on photography for everything from motion studies to employee selection to advertising. This practice gave rise to many features of modern industry familiar to us today: consulting, ''scientific'' approaches to business practice, illustrated advertising, and the use of applied psychology. In this imaginative study, Elspeth H. Brown examines the intersection of photography as a mass technology with corporate concerns about efficiency in the Progressive period. Discussing, among others, the work of Frederick W. Taylor, Eadweard Muybridge, Frank Gilbreth, and Lewis Hine, Brown explores this intersection through a variety of examples, including racial discrimination in hiring, the problem of photographic realism, and the gendered assumptions at work in the origins of modern marketing. She concludes that the goal uniting the various forms and applications of photographic production in that era was the increased rationalization of the modern economy through a set of interlocking managerial innovations, technologies that sought to redesign not only industrial production but the modern subject as well.

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Physiognomy of American Labor: Photography and Employee Rationalization2. Industrial Choreography: Photography and the Standardization of Motion3. Engineering the Subjective: Lewis W. Hine's Work Portraits and Corporate Paternalism in the 1920s4. Rationalizing Consumption: Photography and Commercial IllustrationConclusionNotesSelected BibliographyIndex

""Meticulous research and rich contextualization... A welcome and imaginative addition to the history of visual technologies and commercial history.""

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