Signs of Labor: American Photography after Photomontage,
1926–1951
Margaret Innes
Patricia and Phillip Frost Predoctoral Fellow
Harvard University
Whether in an idiom of documentary or modernist art, American interwar
photography has long been defined by its adherence to a “straight” photographic
aesthetic, characterized by sharp focus, dramatic tonal range, and authorial “previsualization.” While postmodernist narratives have accounted for this aesthetic’s
discursive formation, little work has been recuperated from beyond its limits. Toward
this end, this dissertation offers an expanded history of the photographic public
sphere between the world wars, arguing that from 1926 to 1951 the American leftwing mass media served as a key site of reception for European avant-garde practices
that re-theorized the role of the artist through strategies of montage, pictorial
statistics, and collective production. As opposed to the integral whole of the “straight”
photograph, these practices declared the limits of photographic representation,
mobilizing pictorial fragments to construct revealing juxtapositions within and across
images. Examining the visual negotiation and codification of these practices as they
were first assimilated in print and ultimately absorbed into institutional discourses of
art, this project reframes straight photography of the interwar period not as a stable
category of production but rather, by 1936, as a paradoxical return to a paradigm of
individual authorship, technique, and craft.
Each chapter examines one episode from the interwar period: the reception of
German models of montage in the American pictorial Labor Defender (1926–1937);
the use of the pictorial statistical methods of Viennese philosopher Otto Neurath and
his student Rudolf Modley in Photo-History magazine (1937–1938); and the formation
of the New York Photo League (1936–1951), whose genealogical ties to Labor
Defender complicate the group’s self-professedly straight, documentary aesthetic of
the 1930s–1950s. Each chapter focuses on a key publication or organization (Labor
Defender, Photo-History, and the Photo League) and visual strategy (photomontage,
pictorial statistics, and straight photography) to consider points of transatlantic
exchange, shifting attitudes on the American left toward the sufficiency of
photographic representation, and the influence of this bloc on institutional narratives
of photography.