Winner, Association of American Publishers' Professional and Scholarly
Publishing Award in Business, Management and Accounting
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.