Advertising photography
There can be little argument that in modern capitalist societies the camera has proved to be an absolutely indispensable tool for the makers of consumer goods, for those involved with public relations and those who sell ideas and services. Camera images have been able to make invented ‘realities’ seem not at all fraudulent and have permitted viewers to suspend disbelief while remaining aware that the scene has been contrived. (Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, 1989)During the 19th century, photography was used only rarely to advertise products or businesses. Some photographic advertisements appeared on trade cards or, by the 1890s, as small informative half-tones in catalogues or periodicals. At the beginning of the 20th century, articles devoted to advertising photography began to appear in photographic journals. Early advisers set the tone for the rest of the century. They recommended that photographic illustrations feature human-interest subjects in a clearly understandable image, but interpreted in a personally expressive style. But the industry was slow to adopt this perspective.
At first, because they did not see the interpretative qualities of photographs, ad men used photographs exclusively with ad campaigns that employed the directive ‘reason why’ strategy, which lectured consumers on the benefits of the product. When early 20th-century advertising psychologists, particularly Walter Dill Scott, demonstrated that consumers were open to suggestion, they provided support for a new suggestive advertising strategy (often called ‘atmosphere advertising’). Art directors typically employed drawn and painted illustrations with this new suggestive ‘atmosphere advertising’. However, as the atmosphere strategy became dominant around the First World War, some advertisers began to recognize the usefulness of the subjectivity of the soft-focus, fine-art style of pictorialist photography. Lejaren à Hiller was the pioneer. His style of photographic illustration for fiction in women's magazines advanced the integration of pictorialist aesthetics into advertising. Soft focus, dramatic lighting, heavy retouching, combination printing, and complex stage sets were the perfect visual expressions of the suggestive strategy.
Good-quality photographic half-tones became available around 1890, but photographs were used only intermittently in advertising imagery until the 1920s. There were some highlights, such as Hiller's work, and the ‘sensation’ caused in 1897 by a ‘combination photograph’ (photomontage) that invented a scene of President McKinley and Queen Victoria drinking tea (still recalled three decades later in Frank Presbrey's 1929 History and Development of Advertising). But advertising photography came into its own only in the 1920s, as the advertising industry grew because of the vibrant economy and the national distribution of goods. In 1920 fewer than 15 per cent of illustrated advertisements in mass-circulated magazines employed photographs; by 1930, almost 80 per cent did.
The advertising industry professionalized rapidly after the First World War. The industry that had started as space jobbers in the 19th century added specialists such as copywriters, art directors, psychologists, and account executives to agency staffs. The new art directors established professional organizations almost immediately. The New York Art Directors Club, founded in 1920, soon sponsored exhibitions, awards, and publications, setting a pattern for similar clubs internationally.
The tremendous market for advertising photography provided opportunities for photographers of different aesthetic tendencies. Modernist advertising photography, in particular, blossomed as a fitting symbol for the self-conscious modernity of the times. The Clarence H. White School of Photography led in training commercial photographers to employ the new vision. White had been a successful pictorialist photographer associated with Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession. He began to teach photography in 1907 and in 1914 opened his own school, with a curriculum that emphasized design principles and encouraged work in the applied arts. White based the philosophy of his school—the ‘fusion of beauty and utility’—on that of his colleague at Columbia Teachers College, Arthur Wesley Dow, who advocated a democratic ideal of art appreciation and urged the application of fine-art principles to industrial and commercial design. Some of White's students, including Anton Bruehl, Margaret Bourke-White, Paul Outerbridge, Ralph Steiner, and Margaret Watkins (1884-1969), became New York's top commercial photographers. They practised a modernist style based on close-up views, spare geometric compositions, oblique vantage points, tonal contrast, and sharpened focus that dominated advertising photography for the next two decades.
In 1923 Edward Steichen landed two commercial photography contracts—to produce fashion and celebrity portrait photography for Condé Nast Publications, and advertising photographs for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. Like Hiller and White, Steichen had been a Pictorialist art photographer who turned to commerce. Easily the dominant and most highly paid commercial photographer in 1920s New York, Steichen counted as his clients makers of beauty products, packaged foods, cars, jewellery, soaps, and so on. For nearly twenty years he worked closely with his art directors, often suggesting photographic interpretations of marketing directions. Steichen's work convinced art directors to look beyond conventional uses of photography (pictorialism for romance and suggestion; straight photography for information and reason-why). He developed a persuasive straight-photography style that projected ideals, aspirations, and obvious fantasies, but made them seem attainable.
New York's modernism was no doubt influenced by European innovations. The utopian perspectives and stylistic radicalism of Dutch De Stijl, Russian Constructivism, and German Bauhaus and
The 1930s were also characterized by a divergent second trend in advertising photography towards pictures of ‘real life’. The economic crisis of the Depression triggered talk of the need for ‘sincerity’ and ‘realism’ in advertising imagery, but in fact led to overly dramatic vignettes accompanied by hyperbolic headlines. The decade also saw technological progress in colour photography. Though printers had been able to register three or four colours by c.1900, it had been extremely challenging for photographers to provide the necessary separation negatives for the individual printing plates. Nicholas Muray in 1931, and Anton Bruehl and Fernand Bourges (fl. 1930s-1950s) in 1932, were able to provide colour advertising through complex and expensive processes. When commercial materials came on the market (particularly Kodachrome in 1935), photographers could make negatives, prints, and transparencies with sufficient ease to allow colour's widespread use in advertising photography.
After the Second World War, there was a tremendous growth in the amount of money allocated for advertising; consequently, its institutional structure grew, with new agencies and publications. The glamour and elegance that often characterized pre-war images of women were supplanted by depictions of conventional gender roles and middle-class family life. Although veterans like Victor Keppler continued to flourish for a while, new faces and styles began to dominate advertising photography; Onofrio Paccione, Bert Stern, and Henry Wolf began their careers.
Perhaps the two best-known commercial photographers of the post-war period are Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, both of whom, like Steichen, made a name in both fashion and advertising photography. Both men began their careers in the 1940s and continued into the 21st century. Both continued an exploration of photographic modernism yet developed highly personal styles. Penn's work is characterized by a pictorial spareness. Seamless backdrop paper or minimal environments replaced 1930s baroque stage sets. Many commentators have noted how the calm elegance of his images tended to objectify the models, turning them into objects like those that populate his product studies and still lifes. In some ways, Avedon's work was more influential for what followed. In their sense of motion and improbable contexts (such as a Cape Canaveral rocket launch, street theatre, and the circus) his pictures exhibited a heightened modernity signalling that the world was about to change radically. His later work simplified backgrounds, isolated figures, and scrutinized features. As with Steichen and Penn, Avedon's personal and commercial work overlapped significantly.
Commercial photography in the 1960s was perhaps less stylistically unified than in other decades. It ranged from William Klein (of Harper's Bazaar), who set mannequin-like models against bold contrasting patterns in the architecture and built environment; to James Moore (also of Harper's), who brought a street-photography aesthetic to fashion photography; to Jeanloup Sieff, who specialized in a more natural appearance of casual outdoor life and family affection; and Diane Arbus, whose art and commercial work played with awkward strangeness. The Japanese photographer Hiro, however, may best express the advertising spirit of the age in his intense colour, elegant formal geometry, and subtle balance. Advertising in the 1960s saw a greater emphasis on internationalism, more space for an overlap of personal and commercial styles, and greater collaboration with art directors. The industry could not ignore changes in social values, and newer representations of gender roles and racial relations took their place alongside traditional ones.
A new trend in 1970s and 1980s advertising photography echoed the soft romanticism of the early 20th century, particularly in the work of Deborah Turbeville (b. 1938) and Sarah Moon. Their ethereal style often revealed frank contemporary attitudes towards sexuality. In the 1980s and 1990s, Herb Ritts produced dramatic narrative images for Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, and Giorgio Armani. Like his predecessors, he developed a distinctive personal style across his fashion, celebrity portrait, and advertising work.
Advertising around the turn of the 21st century provoked new content-based controversies. Where mid-20th-century advertising photography was often criticized for promoting overly traditional visions of life or unrealistic material aspirations, criticism of today's advertising has targeted images that glamorize drug use, tobacco, anorexic bodies, or other unhealthy lifestyles. For example, the clothing manufacturer Benetton, during its association (1984-2000) with Oliviero Toscani, had used AIDS victims, prisoners, and refugees in its advertisements. Were these images made to stir social concern, or simply to shock? The magazine Adbusters, founded in 1989, is devoted to such critiques of the advertising industry.
Commercial photography has long had a significant (though often unacknowledged) place in the history of photography. The advertising industry turned to photography when it discovered the photograph's power to convey the joys and benefits of consumerism. Advertising agencies, clients, and magazine editors eagerly sought work by Steichen, Penn, Avedon, and others because they recognized their modernism and distinctive personal visions as effective selling tools. Photography remains the dominant advertising medium; and recent scholarly study of advertising photography has helped develop a more complex understanding of the diversity within modernist photography.
— Patricia Johnston
Bibliography
- Dyer, G., Advertising as Communication (1982).
- Sobieszek, R. A., The Art of Persuasion: A History of Advertising Photography (1988).
- Harrison, M., Appearances: Fashion Photography since 1945 (1991).
- Bogart, M. H., Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (1995).
- Yochelson, B., Pictorialism into Modernism: The Clarence H. White School of Photography (1996).
- Johnston, P., Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography (1997).
- Brown, E., ‘Rationalizing Consumption: Lejaren à Hiller and the Origins of American Advertising Photography’,
Enterprise and Society ,1 (Dec. 2000). - Salvemini, L. P., Benetton-Toscani: storia di un avventura 1984-2000 (2002)
