Visualizing Labor

Even as most acknowledge the twentieth century’s proliferation of images and despite the scholarly “visual turn,” historians appear disinterested in photography as an evidentiary source. This presentation explores several photographs of labor in the postwar era, identifying how students might read and contextualize these images. Teaching students to see past the content of a photograph allows a deeper understanding of the political stakes of photography. Images will include corporate and documentary style photographs, and include images of photographers themselves, as their labors are often purposefully erased in the “objective” aesthetics employed by photojournalists, documentarians, and commercial photographers.