The Corporate Eye
Subtitle: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (Studies in Industry and Society)
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: June 21, 2005
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 344
ISBN-13: 9780801880995
Subjects: Business & Management; Special kinds of photography; c 1800 to c 1900; c 1900 - c 1914; Science; History; Business / Economics / Finance; Science/Mathematics; USA; Industries - General; United States - General; History / United States / General; Commercial photography; Business methods; Photography; United States
First sentence: In 1913 a contributor to the Scientific American decried the "wasteful and expensive" manner in which contemporary employers hired workers.
Description: "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 the work of, among others, 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 re-design not only, industrial production but the modern subject itself." --Book Jacket.