Eyes on Labor

In the twentieth century's first decades, U.S. workers waged an epic struggle to achieve security through unions; simultaneously Americans came to interpret current events through newspaper photographs. Eyes on Labor brings these two revolutions together, revealing how news photography brought workers into the nation's mainstream. Carol Quirke focuses on images ignored by scholars but seen by millions of Americans in the news of the day. Part visual analysis, part labor and cultural history, Quirke analyzes over one hundred photographs: stereographs of the Uprising of 1877, tabloid photos of the 1919 strike wave, photo-essays in the nationally popular LIFE Magazine, and even photos taken by a union camera club. Quirke anchors her interpretations in a lively historical narrative that takes readers from Washington D.C. hearings, to small towns in Indiana and Pennsylvania, to local union halls and to New York City boardrooms. Illuminating why unions, employers, and news publishers vied to represent workers with the camera's eye, Eyes on Labor explores how Americans understood the complex and contradictory portrait of labor they produced.
"Quirke is a skillful, nimble critic with impressive interdisciplinary chops. Eyes on Labor is, among other things, a convincing cultural history that combines a synthetic knowledge of scholarship on labor with rich archival details and case studies; an astute study of photojournalism, keyed to crucial transitions in media and photographic technology; and a compelling analysis of visual culture that offers finely tuned, if typically brief, interrogations of specific images, attending to the nuances of composition, intertextual reference, and institutional context." --caa.reviews

"Eyes on Labor fills a gap by analyzing this ongoing struggle, focusing on the period of unions' ascendancy from the 1930s to the early 1950s. Highly Recommended." --CHOICE

"Carol Quirke has written a finely crafted study of the rise of photojournalism, focused on organized labor. Filled with insights, the book is based upon a nuanced reading of the visual record, including periodicals such as Life and Steel Labor, along with deep archival research. Eyes on Labor is a wonderful work that will interest anyone who cares about consumer culture, mass media, and labor history."--David Jaffee, visual editor of Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society

"In displaying the shifting construction of class identity and trade unionism in mass circulation magazines, Carole Quirke brilliantly shows the political significance of visual representation in the twentieth century; working-class use of photography for self-enhancement; and the shifting public profile of the labor movement during its turbulent and institutionalizing decades, the1930s to the 1950s. This powerful and original work is cultural history at its most potent."--Eileen Boris, coauthor of Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State

INTRODUCTION: "THE CENTRAL INSTRUMENT OF OUR TIME" ; 1. "THE QUICK NERVOUSNESS OF PICTURES IS A NEW LANGUAGE:" DEPICTING ORGANIZED LABOR BEFORE PHOTOJOURNALISM ; 2. CONSUMING LABOR: LIFE MAGAZINE AND MASS PRODUCTION UNIONISM, 1936-1941 ; 3. BITTER KISSES: SIT-DOWN STRIKE AT THE HERSHEY CHOCOLATE CORPORATION, APRIL 1937 ; 4. "STRIKE PHOTOS ARE STAR WITNESSES:" PHOTOGRAPHS AND NEWSREELS OF THE MEMORIAL DAY MASSACRE, MAY 1937 ; 5. STEEL LABOR AND THE UNITED STEEL WORKERS OF AMERICA'S CULTURE OF CONSTRAINT, 1936-1950 ; 6. "THIS PICTURE SHOWS WHAT WE ARE FIGHTING FOR:" RANK AND FILE PHOTOGRAPHY OF NEW YORK CITY'S LOCAL 65, 1933-1953 ; CONCLUSION ; BIBLIOGRAPHY