the United States and abroad. White was active in
Ohio in the late years of the nineteenth century until
he relocated to New York in 1906.
The 1904 World’s Fair held in St. Louis, Mis-
souri, served as a magnet for photojournalists and
amateur photographers alike. Many, including
Frances Benjamin Johnston and Jessie Tarbox
Beals, had honed their photographic skills just a
decade earlier at the 1893 World’s Columbian
Exposition in Chicago. Like the fair in Chicago,
the St. Louis Fair was another opportunity for the
city and the country to showcase U.S. technologi-
cal advancements and triumphs of imperialistic
power. America’s recent conquest of the Philip-
pines in the war with Spain was highlighted in the
reconstructed Philippines reservation with 1,200
inhabitants. Likewise to satiate fairgoers curiosity
of mysterious foreign peoples, the Fair’s organizers
recreated ethnic villages in a world bazaar.
The Anthropology Department organized the
ethnological displays showing the cultural-graded
progress from the most primitive types to the
‘‘enlightened and civilized peoples.’’ The Gerhard
sisters—Emme and Mamie Gerhard—photogra-
phers who lived in St. Louis, had made arrange-
ments with the Fair administrators to make and
sell photographs of the lower ‘‘culture grades’’ of
people on exhibition. Their work operated to
support the ideology of the fair to construct
racial differences between white Americans and
‘‘other’’ peoples.
A veteran of the Chicago Fair, and renowned in
her own right by then, Frances Benjamin John-
ston was active as a photographer and an official
judge for the photography awards at the St. Louis
Fair. Johnston concentrated on trade exhibitions
and on ceremonial openings, such as the dedi-
cation of the Siam pavilion. Johnston also took
a number of photographs of the official perfor-
mances put on in the ethnic villages. These
‘‘staged ceremonies’’ objectified the native peoples
and exonerated the United States’ imperialistic
aims, showing how uncivilized their lives had
been before colonization and democratization.
Although Jessie Tarbox Beals arrived in St.
Louis with credentials as a staff photographer
with theBuffalo Courier, she still found it impos-
sible to gain comparable access to photograph the
fair as had the Gerhard Sisters and Johnston.
Undaunted by the regulations, Beals acquired a
‘‘pre-exhibition permit,’’ which allowed her to
make photographs prior to the opening of the fair
but prevented her from selling her photographs.
Wandering the fairgrounds, Beals was drawn to
little-known peoples in their native habitats, docu-
menting their daily lives and unofficial occurrences.
She photographed the Igorots, the Bogobos, the
Zulus, the Hottentots, the Eskimos, the Filipinos,
and other exotic cultures. Her big break came when
she happened on a scene of a ‘‘Patagonian Giant’’
of South America standing next to a ‘‘Pygmy’’ and
got the exclusive image. The comparison picture of
the ‘‘evolutionary model’’ was lauded by the Fair
officials and secured Beals the license she originally
sought to photograph officially at the fair.1920s
In 1927, Precisionist artist and photographer
Charles Sheeler was hired to document the new
Ford Motor Company manufacturing facility
southwest of Dearborn, Michigan, about ten miles
from Detroit. The plant lay near the River Rouge
giving it access to the Great Lakes and the Atlantic
via the St. Lawrence seaways. Often referred to as
River Rouge or ‘‘the Rouge,’’ the plant, designed to
produce the new Model A, was at the time the
largest industrial complex in the world.
As Ford Motor Company had recently lost mar-
ket share with the decline of sales of the Model T,
consumer acceptance of the new Model A was
vital. Ford hired Vaughn Flannery, head of the
advertising firm N. W. Ayer & Son, to promote
the new automobile. Sheeler’s commission to
photograph the River Rouge plant was a small
part of a huge promotional and advertising cam-
paign that Flannery and his firm organized during- Sheeler’s mandate was to photograph ‘‘de-
tails of the plants and portraits of machinery,’’
which he did with an objectifying eye.
Orienting his pictures along a vertical axis, Shee-
ler applied strong formal qualities to exterior and
interior shots and the details of the plants and the
portraits of machines. Industrial and architectonic
forms coalesce in bold abstract compositions to
represent the might and genius of Ford. Sheeler
made two trips to Dearborn, presenting Ford
with a collection of 32 Rouge photographs.
In his exterior views, Sheeler concentrated on the
early stages of the auto-making process, all of
which had to do with steel making—the transfor-
mation of raw material, crisscrossing conveyors of
coke and coal, into industrial goods. Other exterior
shots showed huge cranes near the boat slips or the
salvage ships before being broken up for their steel.
Inside he followed a similar strategy concentrating
on the heavy machinery and blast furnaces, the
more sublime aspects of industry and ending with
an image of abstract beauty. The close-up ‘‘por-
traits’’ of machinery objectified the simplicity and
UNITED STATES: THE MIDWEST, PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE