Eyes on Labor: News Photography and America's Working Class

Quirke, Carol. Eyes on Labor: News Photography and America's Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 358 pp. $99.Eyes on Labor is a valuable contribution to the history of journalism, exploring the ways in which imagery has been deployed in reporting, but also by corporate and labor interests, to shape public perceptions of American workers and their struggles. Its origins lie in a study of Life magazine's depiction of the Great Depression, which found that despite its black-and-white palette the depicted an America "closer to the Technicolor Land of Oz than dowdy, dust bowl Kansas." As the quote suggests, this is a well-written, engaging study, and an ambitious one. It encompasses representations of class, of visual language, of the ways even sympathetic portrayal of labor struggles can elide workers' agency.Eyes on Labor examines the representation of labor from the earliest days of visual representation in newspapers and magazines through the 1940s, though the emphasis is on the 1930s and 1940s. Of particular interest is the diversity of Quirke's case studies, including the early days of Life magazine, the Memorial Day Massacre and the Hershey Chocolate Sit-Down Strike, and the sharply contrasting visual representations offered in the Steel Workers' Steel Labor and the rank-and-file photography that dominated Distributive Workers Local 65's publication.Photographs were widely seen as objective representations of reality; indeed Quirke argues that they derive much of their persuasive power from this perception. But it has long been recognized that images are constructed, selected, and displayed to represent the world in particular ways. Even the same photo might be used in a union newspaper to represent workers' activism and strength, or in more commercial media to represent danger-the different interpretations conveyed through captions, cropping, and the context in which the image appears.An opening chapter examines pictorial representations of the 1877 railroad strike, the 1919 strike wave, and the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Photojournalism was in its infancy for much of this period, and it was difficult to capture action. Photographers aimed to "document" working-class life, but from an outsider's perspective. News photography typically depicted strikers as dangerous mobs and workers as diligent, anonymous toilers. But technological improvements made possible more lively imagery, and facilitated the reproduction of photos for mass audiences.The launch of Life magazine in 1936 paralleled the explosion in unionization across American industry. Workers (and especially union leaders) were depicted in Life , but the magazine's pages were increasingly preoccupied with the dangers of social unrest, inevitably seen as the product of workers' activities, rather than those of the employers or police. Hershey chocolate effectively used photographs to promote an idealized image of its company town and labor relations, and to whitewash the use of thugs to break a 1937 sit-down strike. …