Carol Quirke’s Eyes on Labor is an assiduously researched and impressively crafted study that examines the depiction of workers and unions in American news photography, focusing on the 1930s and 1940s. During this era of rapid unionization, Quirke argues, photography became a key medium in the battle between labor and capital, as corporations, unions, and the news organizations that recorded the conflicts between them “sought to harness [photography’s] apparent objectivity to make competing claims about workers, unions, labor’s aspirations, and ideals for labor-management relations” (17). Quirke explores not so much how news photography reflected labor conflicts, but rather how photojournalism shaped and defined those very conflicts in the first place. In an age of expanding mass media, struggles over labor’s fate, this book astutely asserts, were struggles over visual representation.

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. The interdisciplinary threads so adroitly woven together in Quirke’s book are especially on display in the first chapter, which examines depictions of laborers in the era before modern photojournalism emerged in the mid-1930s in LIFE magazine and other venues. As Quirke glosses representations of workers produced during seminal strikes and struggles, such as the 1877 railroad strikes and the massacres in Homestead, Pennsylvania (1892), and Ludlow, Colorado (1914), she provides a corresponding history of photographic technologies. While in most late nineteenth-century images, strikers were motionless and events staged because “film magazines and coordinating the aperture and exposure remained cumbersome” (25), developments such as halftone reproduction, the Speed Graphic camera, and the rise of tabloid journalism transformed the way labor conflicts could be depicted. As labor gained power in the 1930s, especially after the passage of the National Recovery Act in 1933 and the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, additional technological advancements, such as high-speed, hand-held cameras and high-speed film, enabled photographers “to represent labor’s mobilization as never before” (44). The era of mass media labor photojournalism had begun.

The most prominent photojournalistic venue in the mid-century period was undoubtedly Henry Luce’s LIFE magazine, which Quirke examines in her second chapter. While LIFE has been the subject of several scholarly studies, none have focused expressly on labor, which fit uneasily into the magazine’s pro-business, consumer-oriented vision of American life. However, the magazine, which sought to extend the markets of its advertisers as widely as possible, featured American workers and unions “more than any other theme” (58), according to Quirke. Not surprisingly, LIFE blamed workers rather than corporations for labor violence, downplayed economic and social inequality, and cast working-class aspirations in the privatized terms of the ascendant mass-consumer culture. Yet, Quirke argues persuasively, LIFE’s coverage of workers on strike nonetheless “wove them into the publication’s gleeful portrait of America,” breaking from the blunt anti-unionism of many other mass-market publications (75). The ambivalence of LIFE’s stance toward unions is captured in Quirke’s elegant interpretation of a 1941 portrait of United Mine Worker President John Lewis. Shot from below, in high-contrast black and white, the photograph, which filled an entire page of the magazine, lends Lewis gravity, but also depicts him, Quirke notes, “as a menace from one of the low-budget horror movies” (105–6).

The last four chapters of Eyes on Labor examine case studies in the visual and verbal contest over how labor and labor conflicts were represented in the American media public sphere. Chapter 3 considers photojournalistic accounts of the 1937 sit-down strike at Hershey Chocolates, which made its way into over three hundred news stories and editorials. Quirke notes that coverage tended to follow the National Association of Manufacturing’s portrait of the struggle, which depicted the town of Hershey as a model of corporate-labor harmony that was disrupted by dangerous “outsiders” and union agitators. Chapter 4 analyzes the struggle over media and courtroom interpretations of the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago, in which several hundred picketing Republic Steel workers were injured by police, and ten killed. Although most mainstream news accounts tended to blame strikers for the violence, unions in Chicago and their allies took substantial initiative to craft a visual and verbal counter-story, based in large part on a careful excavation and analysis of photographs and unedited newsreels. The highlight of this forceful chapter is Quirke’s diligent description of the proceedings of the congressional subcommittee chaired by Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette, which, with the help of pro-labor journalists and others, dismantled prevailing police and corporate accounts of the massacre through a rigorous analysis of existing visual evidence. Chapter 5 focuses on Steel Labor, the newspaper of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, finding that it continually downplayed conflict and hardship, presenting union members as motivated by private concerns rather than collective aims. Quirke contends that the paper’s rigid, often anonymous images of workers “did not inspire solidarity or engagement” (197), effectively undermining union strength. The liveliest chapter—lively in large part because it features photography by workers themselves—is the final one, on the camera work sponsored by the warehouse and distributive workers’ union Local 65. A union committed to fostering an active, engaged membership, Local 65 sponsored a camera club and used its members’ images in New Voices, its newspaper. Cultivating what Quirke, following Leah Ollman, calls “an organizing eye” (227) that privileged dynamic photographs of member activity, Local 65 created a vigorous visual culture that was instrumental to its mobilization and union-building efforts.

If Eyes on Labor ends with a compelling example of the way one union used photographs to forge collective power, its overall trajectory confirms the dominance of mid-century corporate image-work, which tended to denigrate, depoliticize, or dismiss labor activism. In downplaying the potency of pro-labor photography, Quirke challenges two of the most innovative and influential studies of Depression-era unions and mass culture, Lizabeth Cohen’s Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (2nd ed., New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (new ed., New York: Verso, 2011). Both Cohen and Denning launched bold claims for the influence and unity of union culture: Cohen argues that rather than pacifying workers mass culture in fact provided the common ground for their collective mobilization; Denning argues that Left artists and mass-cultural workers spread labor-inflected ideas and values across a range of cultural fields and media during the 1930s and beyond. In contrast, Quirke’s sober assessment of the way workers were depicted in mass-circulation magazines and union newspapers suggests that, rather than enhancing labor’s strength and coherence, photographs of labor ultimately, and despite some notable exceptions, tended to purvey anti-union perceptions. “Even at the height of twentieth-century populism,” she asserts, “imagery in mass publications and in labor papers alike ignored workers’ collective power, insisting on the power of businessmen, corporate heads, or labors’ leaders to forge the good life for workers” (15). Given that the height of union influence in the post-war period coincided with a decline in member mobilization and militancy after the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1948, this is not an especially surprising claim; but, in challenging Denning and Cohen, her assessment of the relationship between unions and mass (visual) culture opens new grounds for scholarly inquiry and debate.

Throughout, Quirke proves a shrewd critic with a rigorous eye, although her book is likely to appeal more to the historians in art history than the art critics. Her readings are rigorously contextual, as she situates specific photographs in their journalistic and historical location. This approach, and the fact that the images she analyzes were often taken quickly in the heat of conflict or struggle, means that she does not offer elaborate formal or symbolic interpretations of the sort that often anchor conventional art-historical studies. The book includes almost no engagement with photographic theory (Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, for instance, do not make the bibliography), or with recent debates over documentary, and it could have benefitted from sharper claims about how the camera work under discussion converses with the aesthetic history of American photography.

However, Quirke’s turn to labor photojournalism, and away from documentary photography, is a salient move with significant critical implications. In particular, she contends that visual culture scholars have overemphasized the “populist aesthetics” of documentary photography at the expense of mass-media images of working people. “Current scholarship,” she argues,” tells us much about the multiple and contradictory meanings of the common man, but little about visual images of actual workers at a moment of great collective transformation” (7). This refocusing of critical attention makes a great deal of sense. After all, while images taken under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) circulated widely, historians have been remiss in overlooking the stories about labor in LIFE magazine, which had a circulation of two million by 1939, and in union newspapers, which were reaching over thirty million American households by 1950 (7, 14). Yet the line Quirke draws between documentary photography and photojournalism may be a bit too bright: several FSA photographers, as Quirke notes, went on to work for LIFE and other mass-market magazines, and Quirke might have expanded the scholarly reach of her book by creating more of a dialogue between the journalistic images she discusses and contemporaneous documentary images of labor—especially by Dorothea Lange, for instance, who gets almost no mention in the book.

Eyes on Labor is a powerful work of cultural history; written with verve and showcasing compelling archival research, it opens new terrain for scholarly investigation. Equally important, Quirke inserts class and labor—two scandalously understudied topics in American cultural studies—into the heart of received narratives about the development of modern American photojournalism, prodding us to think more deeply about the relationship between economic struggle, visual culture, and the formation of American modernity.