The Critical Eye: Reading Commercial Photography

Abstract

Thirty years ago, Marsha Peters and Bernard Mergen delivered a call to action in the pages of American Quarterly, urging readers to reconsider the use of photographs in American studies.1 The authors identified a lamentable tendency in the field to either neglect the social and cultural importance of photographic images or view them simply as decorations for historical writing. Photographs, they explained, contain valuable information not found in written records, information that can only be communicated and analyzed in visual terms.2 Scholars must therefore learn to interpret the particular grammar and syntax, or visual rhetoric, of a photograph and then locate its creation and consumption in the history of photography as well as in America's social and cultural history. The much-neglected genre of commercial photography is ideal for interpretation, Peters and Mergen went on to argue, given the mass-cultural importance and sheer volume of public photographs commissioned by government agencies, corporations, and other institutions. The publication in 2005 of Elspeth H. Browns The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929, in the wake of vigorous scholarly activity concerning American visual culture of this period, shows us that their proposed use and method of interpreting commercial photographs has increasingly been adopted by scholars in American studies.3 It also teaches us that new questions about photography, unanticipated by proponents of visual analysis thirty years ago, are now being asked in this field. The subject of Brown's study is the important role that commercial photography played during America's second industrial revolution, as corporate managers, engineers, planners, consultants, art directors, and merchandisers attempted to standardize subjectivities in the industrial workplace and marketplace. Brown shows us how this new class of professionals used the camera