Day reading Passage (Australian culture and culture shock)

A brief history of photography in advertising
Commercial photography has long had a significant place in the history o f photography,
and the advertising industry has been its largest benefactor.
In the late 19th century, photography was used only rarely to advertise products or 
businesses. Photographs occasionally appeared on business cards or as small informative 
pictures in catalogues and magazines, but it wasn’t until the early 20th century that 
advertisers began to realise the enormous potential of this relatively new medium. At first, 
most preferred to use a ‘reason why’ strategy, with the result that their photographs just 
showed consumers the benefits of the product. However, when advertising psychologists 
in the early 20th century demonstrated that consumers were open to suggestion, they 
provided support for a new suggestive advertising strategy, often called ‘atmosphere 
advertising’. Some more adventurous advertisers had already been experimenting with 
this, arguing that photographs did not need to show what a product could do, but could 
instead create a mood or feeling that people would associate with that product.
One of the inspirations for this strategy was American illustrator and photographer 
John Hiller who, in the early 1900s, was illustrating stories in women’s magazines with 
photographs. He employed a soft focus technique, and used dramatic lighting and complex 
stage sets to create visually stunning pictures. His style was revolutionary for the time, and 
it gradually occurred to advertisers that this type of picture would be ideal for illustrating 
advertisements. As a result, photographs in advertisements suddenly became very 
popular. In 1920, fewer than 15 percent of illustrated advertisements in mass-circulated 
magazines employed photographs. By the end of the decade this figure had soared to 
about 80 percent.
The tremendous new market for advertising photography provided a wealth of business 
opportunities for professional photographers. Clarence White, a successful pictorial 
photographer, led the way in training commercial photographers at his school in New 
York. He encouraged his students to apply a fine-art style of photography to industrial and 
commercial design, combining (as he put it) ‘beauty and utility’. Some of his students went 
on to become New York’s top commercial photographers. They practised a modernist 
style based on close-up views, spare geometric compositions, unusual vantage points 
and sharp focus that dominated advertising photography for the next twenty years. It 
was also at this time that images of real-life situations began to be used in advertising, 
a trend that became especially popular in the 1930s when the economic disaster of the 
Great Depression prompted advertisers to adopt the qualities of sincerity and realism in 
advertising imagery. The 1930s also saw technological progress in colour photography,

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Reading Passage 1
and when commercial colour film went on sale for the first time in 1935, the widespread 
use of colour in advertising photography suddenly became much more affordable.
The dominant and most highly paid commercial photographer of the 1920s and 1930s was 
Edward Steichen. Like Clarence White, Steichen had been a pictorialist art photographer 
who turned to commerce. In 1923 he landed two commercial photography contracts - to 
produce fashion and celebrity portrait photographs for Conde Nast periodicals, and to 
produce advertising photographs for J. Walter Thompson, a major advertising agency.
Over the next twenty years, he built up a huge client list, which included makers of beauty 
products, packaged foods, cars, jewellery and soaps. He was one of the first commercial 
photographers to work in close collaboration with his art directors, convincing them to 
look beyond conventional uses of photography in advertising pictorialism for romance and 
suggestion; straight photography for information and reason why). During his long career, 
he evolved a persuasive photography style that projected ideals, aspirations and obvious 
fantasies, but made them seem attainable.
By the 1940s, advertising was seriously big business, and vastly increased budgets 
meant that photographers working for the business could be more and more ambitious 
and experimental. The two best-known commercial photographers at this time were Irving 
Penn and Richard Avedon. While both continued to use photographic modernism in their 
advertising photography, they developed highly personal styles. Penn’s pictures were 
characterised by a minimalist style which projected an image of calm elegance. Avedon’s 
photographs were much more dynamic and conveyed an important message: the world 
was changing, and it was changing very quickly. His work, perhaps more than any other, 
was to influence future commercial photographers, and his style is still very popular today.
Commercial photography in the 1960s was less stylistically unified than in previous 
decades. It also saw a greater emphasis on internationalism and greater collaboration 
with art directors. Furthermore, there were huge changes in beliefs and attitudes, 
especially with regard to the way we behaved, or the way we saw ourselves and others. 
The advertising industry could not ignore this with the result that newer representations 
of things like gender roles took their place alongside traditional ones. This set the tone for 
advertising photography in the remaining decades of the 20th century.
Advertising around the turn of the 21st century provoked new content-based controversies. 
Where mid-20th century advertising photography was often criticised for promoting overly 
traditional visions of life or unrealistic material aspirations, criticism of today’s advertising 
has targeted images that glamorise unhealthy lifestyles. Criticism has also been directed 
at advertisements that appear to be trying to shock, offend or provoke rather than sell 
a product. One well-known clothing company, for example, received a lot of negative 
attention when it used powerful images of prisoners, refugees and a blood-covered T-shirt 
in a series of advertisements. These became notorious for their provocative content and 
led to a re-evaluation of what should and shouldn’t be acceptable in advertising.

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Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.
Day 22
Questions 1-5
Complete the table below.