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.