The High Art of Photographic Advertising

Harvard’s Business School’s Baker Library has produced an exhibition about a generation of photographers with a modernist sensibility pursuing commercial photography as both an artistic endeavor and a profession. Now that Madmen will be beginning their new season on July 25 (AMCTV), it’s well worth a look back through The High Art of Photographic Advertising:

The exhibit is curated by Melissa Banta and what follows is from sections of the exhibit’s text:

“On September 18, 1934, a stunning exhibition sponsored by the National Alliance of Art and Industry (NAAI) and the Photographic Illustrators, Inc. opened in the gallery of New York City’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The show featured 250 works by the top artistic and commercial photographers of the day, with a particular focus on advertising and industrial images. In 1935, approximately 125 prints from the NAAI exhibition came to Harvard Business School, which was actively collecting photographs for exhibition and classroom use. The High Art of Photographic Advertising revisits the 1934 exhibition — a collection that seventy-five years later survives as a telling chapter in evolving perceptions about photography’s artistic, commercial, and cultural significance.”

“When the photographic exhibition sponsored by the National Alliance of Art and Industry (NAAI) and the Photographic Illustrators, Inc. opened in the 30 Rockefeller Plaza gallery in September 1934, the exhibition’s organizers paid homage to Alfred Stieglitz in a reception dedicated to the ‘dean of American photography.’ By the 1930s a new generation of photographers with a modernist sensibility pursued commercial photography as both an artistic endeavor and a profession, and exhibitions around the United States began to bring attention to their work in the context of a fine-art setting.”

“In the Rockefeller Plaza mezzanine were approximately 250 works by 50 artists, including such well-known photographers as Russell Aikins, Margaret Bourke-White, Nickolas Muray, John Paul Pennebaker, William Rittase, and Edward Steichen. From atmospheric pictures depicting the working conditions of coal miners to abstract views conveying the luxury enjoyed by owners of Chrysler’s latest automobiles, viewers were treated, as The New York Times’s review noted, to works of ‘technical excellence and adaptation to purpose” by “leaders of the photographer’s art.’ “

The Dream Realities section includes the following:

“Commercial photographers worked their medium not only to capture the realistic elements of a subject but also to imbue it with idealized qualities. The modernist sensibility manifested itself in the creation of fractured forms and compositions that encouraged viewers to see products from entirely new perspectives. Inventive angles, extreme close-ups, and manipulation of light and shadow could create a sense of movement, reveal new dimensions and textures, and transform the mundane and everyday into beautiful abstractions. Through these techniques, writes cultural historian Jackson Lears, photographers and advertisers ‘aimed to animate the inanimate commodity with the appearance of life and sometimes explicitly with magical powers.’ “

“As advertisers and photographers attempted to transform everyday objects into the extraordinary, they were also crafting a narrative: that the objects themselves epitomized style, luxury, and the key to a more fulfilling life. In the studio, models were visually transformed into members of an elite class of enviable sophistication and taste — an ideal with which the consumer could identify simply by buying the product on display. Patricia Johnston writes in Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography (University of California Press, 1997) that advertisers understood ‘photography could make beauty accessible, lead the way to a happier life, map out the possessions required to transcend class status, and project a perfect world and make it seem available.’ “

Digital images from the Art and Industry Photography Collection can be viewed through Harvard University’s Visual Information Access (VIA) system.