Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography

Abstract

During the 1920s and 1930s, Edward Steichen was a succesful photographer in the advertising industry. His commercial photography appeared in Vanity Fair, Vogue, Ladies Home Journal and almost all popular magazines in the US. At a time when photography was just beginning to replace drawings as the favoured advertising medium, Steichen helped transform the producers of small family business products to national household names. In this book, the author uses Steichen's work as a case study of the history of advertising and the American economy between the wars. She traces the development of Steichen's work from an early naturalistic style through to increasingly calculated attempts to construct consumer fantasies. By the 1930s, alluring images of romance and class, developed in collaboration with agency staff and packaged in overtly manipulative and persuasive photographs, became Steichen's stock-in-trade. He was most frequently chosen by agencies for products targeted towards women: his images depicted vivacious singles, earnest new mothers and other stereotypically female life stages that reveal a great deal about the industry's perceptions of and pitches to this particular audience.

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