Motionless pictures: the waiting public in popular American visual culture, 1870-1930

Abstract

ABSTRACT In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the histories of waiting, particularly in medicine, business, politics, and culture. This essay contributes to that history by tracing the evolving visual representation of waiting in popular American culture between 1870 and 1930. As contemporary illustrators, photographers and artists interpreted a metropolitan landscape populated by waiting subjects, they helped inscribe an increasingly routine experience with an enduring set of meanings – efficiency, convenience, equality, comfort, and alienation, for instance – while at the same time drawing upon and reinventing older visual traditions of social representation. The original subjects of waiting imagery were queues, which cartoonists and sketch artists used to imagine the shifting boundaries of citizenship. As urban realism and ‘muckraking’ came into vogue in the century’s final decades, the imagery of waiting shifted from allegorical queues to literal scenes of migration, poverty and unemployment. In the twentieth century, the archetypal scene of waiting shifted once again, this time to a more consumer-oriented landscape of monumental railroad stations, department store waiting rooms, and private and public bureaucratic spaces. By the 1920s, this article concludes, waiting imagery had transitioned from a tool of critique – a means of articulating social crisis – into a common advertising trope. This article attempts a thematic rather than formal analysis of the origins of that trope, in order to reveal how slowness, as much as speed and acceleration, became an essential part of the modernizing United States’ self-image.