Hands off the Machine

Abstract

Images of the modern American factory and the workers who tended its historically productive assembly lines abounded in the visual culture of the 1920s and 1930s. As the United States suffered through an extended depression, artists reflected on the changing meaning of work in an age of machine-driven technological innovation, chronic unemployment, and widespread workplace unrest. This essay examines how these competing forces shaped artistic and popular depictions of the bodies, and particularly the hands, of American workers during the Great Depression. Drawing together the films of the prolific but little-known industrial documentarian Jamison Handy, with the more famous work of contemporaries like Charles Sheeler, Philip Evergood, Charlie Chaplin, and Alice Neel, this essay attempts to situate the symbolic importance of representations of the working—and non-working—hand at this moment within the broader history of the Depression and the emergence of the modern American labor movement.

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