The Science and Technique of Advertising Photography - 1940

In the interwar years advertisers, photographers, and publishers converged as a highly capitalized and visible professional group. Their work was celebrated in World’s Fairs, print media, film, and radio. Innovation in image production and technique was a great theme in their field at the time and consumers hungrily gobbled up image-laden periodicals and new photographic gadgets. Magazines like Popular Photography and US Camera detailed technology, techniques and theory for avid users. Professional photographers and admen weighed-in on amateur challenges and competitions, promoting photography for enterprise and mass communication. Publishers cashed in on widespread enthusiasm for commercial photography by printing uncounted volumes on how you too can earn money in commercial photography.

In his 1940 self help text The Science and Technique of Advertising Photography, Walter Nurnberg, a renowned mid-century industrial photography,  instructs readers on transforming their photographic hobby into a money making venture. Nurnberg uses his own extensive professional experience to outline the key concerns and techniques for aspiring photographers. One juicy passage consists of his description of how photographers should think about and interact with clients, wherein he recycles popular modernist perspectives on mass culture and society. In this passage, Nurnberg explains the great power and responsibility photographers have as visual communicators. He situates commercial photographers within a “huge advertising machine,” nodes in an exciting experiment in modern art and commerce. Because their images find more eyes and touch more lives than ever before, photographers, he says, should think deeply about how their pictures are consumed. What's especially fun is that Nurnberg uses this phrasing to deliver a rather banal message: photographers must see their work within the entire frame of a particular campaign and communicate well with their clients.

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Advertising photography has a great task to perform. Its purpose is to stimulate trade and to help industry to produce more merchandise - and sell it.

The great responsibility involved in this task must be shared by the photographer and his client.

The photographer who has specifically chosen “commercial photography” as his career must realize that he is not only a picture-maker, but an important component of the huge advertising machine. More is expected from him than rudiments of technique or the ability to produce “beautiful” pictures. He must make himself acquainted with commercial thought and business practice. It would be a good idea if every advertising photographer were to incorporate into the curriculum of his professional education a certain amount of practical business training in the same way that he must learn to develop his films and make his prints; obviously he must acquaint himself with the methods of reproduction and the elements of lay-out technique.

On the other hand it must be realized that the buyer of photography has similar obligations within his own sphere. He should go to the trouble to acquaint himself with the peculiar photographic values and latent possibilities of the medium. Only if he knows what can or cannot be done, will he obtain the best results.

Photography has its self contained expressive resources and the good photographer has his own individual vision and method of approach; his imaginative action is different from that of the painter. Photographic jobs must be visualized photographically - not graphically.

The advertising photographer has no direct access to the buying public. His pictures are usually produced for an advertising agent or, less frequently for the advertising manager of a producing or marketing concern. They incorporate the photograph into the individual unit of the advertising scheme. It is obvious that close co-operation between client and photographer is essential. If photography is to be an organic part of the whole campaign the pictures must not only look well but sell well.

The purpose of advertising photography is not to give individual photographer an easy chance to make more money, but to stimulate trade. It is, therefore, a responsible factor in the economic structure and photographs should not be produced or bought in a haphazard manner. Conscientiousness and true knowledge of the subject are needed. The demand for a clear estimate of the intrinsic values of the photographic medium by photographer and client is not an idealistic daydream. It is a commercial necessity.

Walter Nurnberg, The Science and Technique of Advertising Photography. How to Do It Series no. 25. London, New York: The Studio publications, 1940.

Photography and Fine Art - Henry Bailey Turner

Below is a gallery of illustrations from Photography and Fine Art, a manual of photography published by Henry Bailey Turner in 1922. Turner founded School Arts magazine, originally known as The Applied Arts Book. Turner's illustrations offer a glimpse into the strange confidence intoned by photographic instructors of the era. The captions prescribing lighting styles for the sexes are comic today, but reveal the typical gendering of photography in this kind of literature. Turner's rules of composition and balance are interesting too. In the text he develops complex systems for readers to follow in composing their pictures, much of them derived from painting instruction.

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Bristol + Steichen + List + Others

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.

Writing about Steichen's Pacific wartime photography Vettel-Becker paints it this way:

"During World War II, the American public was inundated with photographs of war...[which inscribed] four primary motifs: the transformation of boys into warrior men, the fetishization of weaponry, the spectacle of death, and the quest to penetrate and dominate nature. War is a territorial game played by men to enact dominance, a social performance that inscribes gender identities on human bodies. War, like masculinity, is predicated on the subjugation of the feminine, which is encoded in the body and territory of the enemy, an inscription even more extreme when the enemy is of another race. These photographs enact the play of domination and subjugation through the imagery of impenetrability and rapability, thus contributing to the propagandistic construction of the enemy and extending the voyeuristic pleasures of domination to those not able to experience it firsthand."

These four motifs are not consistent across all of the photography of Vriens-McGrath, McLellan, and Shore, but whether in their critique or their re-inscription, this combination of male bodies, violence, domination, and spectacle is worth looking for in contemporary commercial, fashion, and documentary photography. How do these themes echo the legacy of mid-century wartime photography and in what ways does it mirror other gendering processes apparent in mass-culture?

Erwin Blumenfeld In Video

Below are two seductive films featuring the life and work of Erwin Blumenfeld. The first is an hour long biography of this interesting and somewhat obscure mid-century photographer. It was produced by Blumenfeld's grandson, who describes the film this way:

It's a documentary telling the gripping and shocking story of photographer Erwin Blumenfeld, who survived two world wars to become one of the world's most highly paid fashion photographers and a key influence on the development of photography as an art form. Yet after a mysterious death in Rome in 1969 his name is little known today, the reasons for which lie in his unconventional lifestyle.

The first ever film about his life and work uses exclusive access to Blumenfeld's extensive archive of stunning photographs, fashion films, home movies and self-portraits to tell of a man obsessed by the pursuit of beautiful women, but also by the endless possibilities of photography itself.

With contributions from leading photographers Rankin, Nick Knight and Solve Sundsbo and 82-year-old supermodel Carmen Dell'Orefice, it uncovers the richly complex story of one of the 20th century's most original photographic artists.

The second clip is a typically stylized presentation from NOWNESS featuring a conglomeration (pardon my Georgian) of Blumenfeld's visually stunning motion picture work. Both videos illustrate the strange and often frantic personal and professional lives of commercial photographers in this era. You can learn even more about Blumenfeld here.

Richard Avedon - Jun Ropé

In the early 1970's Richard Avedon directed and appeared in this fantastic ad series for the classic line, Jun Ropé. The ads use the bohemian energy of the commercial studio to sell the glamour and abandon of the Japanese brand. It's an unusual campaign not only for it's scandalous content. Directed by and featuring Richard Avedon, it is one of the only campaigns I've found that puts the photographer at work in the center of the image.

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Thomas Frank - The Conquest of Cool

A typical anti-ad advertisement produced by Doyle Dane Bernbach, a firm featured by Frank throughout the text. Frank makes little mention about how this image was made, why it looks the way it does, or who was involved in its creation. The layout, typesetting, and graphic design are left unexamined as well.

In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank rethinks the emergence of a postwar creative revolution in American consumption and advertising. Rather than occurring through a calculated cooptation of 1960s middle class youth culture – with its hedonistic ethos of sex, drugs, and rock and roll – Frank argues that shifts in the tone and style of advertising in this moment were the product of a marketing industry undergoing dramatic changes of its own. During this time, upstart creative teams in nimble advertising firms created new styles of communication that outperformed the tried formulas of foundational Madison Ave companies. Celebrating the 60s hedonistic individualism that stood in stark contrast to the rationalism of pre-war advertising styles, firms like Doyle Dane Bernbach became the envy of heaving behemoths of the age like JWT and BBDO. A symptom of larger shifts in American business culture, these new agencies embraced sources of inspiration often discovered in unlikely and hostile places. The rift between business and youth culture, we learn, was not as great as it may seem. As Frank points out at the beginning of the text:

This is a study of business thought, but in its consequences it is necessarily a study of cultural dissent as well; its promise, its meaning, its possibilities, and most important, its limitations. And it is, above all, the story of the bohemian cultural style’s trajectory from adversarial to hegemonic; the story of hip’s mutation from native language of the alienated to that of advertising. (Conquest of Cool, 8)

Producers far outnumber consumers in the archive and historians generally struggle with the consumer’s side of the story. As in my project, the production side of mass culture takes center stage in The Conquest of Cool. Despite this, Frank’s supply-side study reveals little of how ads are made. Throughout the text he favors executives, account managers, and copywriters. Creative directors appear, but they seem too colorful or scattered to manage. How much or how little creative teams contributed to the shift he marks in postwar advertising is unresolved and we never even glimpse into the studios where so much work of the creative revolution in advertising was done. This is strange because the artists and photographers who made the ads were innovating rapidly in this period, stimulating new debates over the value of art and commerce in contemporary culture. Ad-execs relied heavily on art departments to deliver hip imagery, but we know little of how photographers and graphic artists were employed. Frank mentions their role in the bohemian culture of small-firm advertising, but only briefly explores the ways creative cadres influenced the content of the ads he uses in making his argument.

The take away, of course, is that even corporations are not immune to wider changes in society and culture. The reason I love The Conquest of Cool is because it convincingly reminds us that businesses are made up of people. Rather than studying the reception of advertising, or performing a semiotic reading of ads in an attempt to grasp at the impact and mysterious power of our most prolific yet most hated source of visual culture, Frank writes a story about who makes ads and how. He challenges us to study cultural production rather than reception, to think about the composition and crafting of power rather than simply critique it. The book, he says, 

...does not address the subject of consumer evasiveness except as it is discussed by advertising executives and menswear manufacturers; it has little to say about the effectiveness of particular modes of popular resistance to mass culture, how this or that symbol was negotiated, détourned, or subverted. While cultural reception is a fascinating subject, I hope the reader will forgive me for leaving it to others. Not only has it been overdone, but our concentration on it, it seems to me, has led us to overlook and even minimize the equally-fascinating doings of the creators of mass culture, a group as playful and even as subversive in their own way as the heroic consumers who are the focus of so much of cultural studies today. ( Conquest of Cool, x)

There is always more to be done and Frank left us room for expansion. Numerous actors and sites of production have yet to be examined, many of which are only now becoming available in the archive. By inserting creative professionals into the story of postwar advertising, we may find that more can be said about the changes Frank revealed.