Walter Herdeg’s 1966 introduction to Photographis makes a bold claim: that advertising photography belongs in the history of art. This post explores how his vision reflects deeper tensions around image-making, creative labor, and the politics of visual taste.

Albert Munsell originated a system for describing color in 1899. The Munsell Color Sphere is a physical model he created which shows color values from black to white (the north and south poles), and is divided like an orange, each slice representing a different color, or hue. Eventually Munsell evolved his sphere to include additional factors depicting the intensity of the colors, represented on the horizontal axis, which is why in the above image there appears to be a malformation in the sphere. Hue, chroma, and value; three vectors determining how a color appears in daylight.

Onto bodies and mid-century photo practices this week. I was reading Patricia Vettel-Becker's article Destruction and Delight, and encountered some Edward Steichen and Horace Bristol images looking at US soldiers in the wartime Pacific. The images reminded me of Herbert List's photographs of German youths made around the same time. Generated on opposite sides of the globe and . List's work is an obvious choice when thinking about masculinity and photography in this moment, but I hadn't made this connection to Steichen of all people. Looking at this kind of work I can't help remembering so many of the fashion and advertising projects I worked on in the mid 2000's; in hindsight so much of that work clearly borrows from this earlier history. Mostly I think of Alisdair Mclellan and Matthias Vriens, but of course one can't help thinking of Collier Schorr, too.

This scandalous 1970s fashion ad campaign by Richard Avedon puts the photographer at the center of the frame—literally. Explore a rare moment when fashion, performance, and authorship collided on set.

This post revisits Richard Ohmann’s Selling Culture to explore how Marxist theory, mass media, and cultural hegemony shape the history of advertising. A foundational text for scholars of visual culture and the political economy of communication.