Photographs have always been used to sell things — including photography itself. While the medium’s artistic qualities were acknowledged from its inception, photography wasn’t considered a full-fledged “fine art” until a group of wealthy elites circa 1900 campaigned to have their work recognized as such. (Even then, art photography wasn’t embraced by museums until the 1970s.) Historically, artists and institutions have defined “fine art” photography in contrast to commercial work, disparaging advertising as cheap and vulgar. This attitude persists, and as ads and influencer monetization bombard social media, it’s easy to see why. It’s exhausting to be sold to constantly. But maintaining aesthetic integrity without a commercial income was, and is, tricky. Early art photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and key members of the Linked Ring, an exclusive British photographic society, were independently wealthy; their desire to distance themselves from the commercial was fundamentally elitist. Surely there has to be a middle ground?
The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art focuses on the first century of advertising photography in the United States and Europe, from the English aristocrat William Henry Fox Talbot’s photographs of glass in 1844 to Murray Duitz’s 1957 advertisement for A.S. Beck men’s shoes. The exhibition captures the evolution of photographic depiction over time: We travel from the classic, painting-inspired format of an object seen head-on and centered in the frame to full modernist disorientation, and back again.
The Real Thing argues that these advertisements helped create “the visual language of modernism,” as the advertising tactics of commercial studios were in dialogue with avant-garde attempts to revolutionize society. For a brief and shining moment in the 1920s and 1930s, this seems to have been the case. While hand-painted photos of candies c. 1915 centered the product on a white background, by the 1930 the horizon had shifted 45 degrees, flooding the frame with diagonal rows of identical mass-produced objects. The best-known photographic artists of the day almost all did commercial work: Edward Steichen, André Kertész, Margaret Bourke-White, James Van Der Zee, and August Sander are featured in the exhibition. The avant-garde parallel is clear. Stella Simon’s photograph of a violin among planes of mirrors, for example, evokes the geometry (and musical instrument imagery) of Cubism. Marcel Duchamp even famously took Paul Outerbridge’s ad for an Ide collar and stuck it to his studio wall, an homage the found object.
So what happened? Around the time the United States entered World War II in late 1941, commercial photographs began returning to the familiar center-frame, saturated color aesthetic. Artistic autonomy was consumed by editorial bureaucracy, and photographic advertising calcified. Today, in art schools across the country, young photographers are urged to see themselves as brands in the making, to use their identities as vehicles for shilling products. Where in the 1800s we had impressively hairy Frenchmen marketing themselves by appropriating Native American dress, today we have “rainbow capitalism,” corporate brands donning the fresh faces of diverse young influencers to sell more products on social media. The Real Thing directs our gaze to an important middle period in this history, a time when the norms and expectations of advertising were still open to artistic innovation. Perhaps it’s a moment from which we can learn.
The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through August 4. The exhibition was curated by Virginia McBride, research associate in the Met’s Department of Photographs.
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