The Rational Factory, Labour, and the Fordist Visual Imaginary
Rick Halpern
The first decades of the twentieth century were a remarkable period for heavy
industry across much of North America and Europe. Mass production of goods such as
rubber and steel -- and consumer products like automobiles and radios -- reached
unprecedented levels. New technologies, most notably assembly lines, the adoption of
interchangeable parts, and the redesign of factory buildings themselves, allowed not just a
greater volume of production but economies of scale that transformed society as a whole.
“Fordism” – the label given to these new regimes of mass production and the culture to
which they gave rise – both promised a new era of general prosperity and foreshadowed a
world of uniformity and alienation. Numerous art forms, from the industrial murals painted
by Diego Rivera in the 1930s to the movies of Charlie Chaplin humorously depicting
regimented factory life, played off and commented upon the promise and dystopian
possibilities of endless manufacture. Photography, too, contributed to the artistic effort to
make sense of the novelty of mass production and express concerns about its regimentation
and forms of control. Indeed, this period saw the making of some of the most p owerful
visual images of industrial life ever created. This essay looks at visual representations of
factory architecture and shop floor activity to fashion an argument about the ways in which
photography contributed to the culture of Fordism.
Any definition of Fordism must originate with the innovations Henry Ford applied to
the building of automobiles in the 1910s. “Mass production,” he wrote, “is the focusing on a
manufacturing project of the principles of power, accuracy, economy, system, co ntinuity,
and speed.” In addition to the moving assembly line, Ford pioneered a transformative shift
away from steam to electric power and customized machine tooling (by the time his
Highland Park Plant opened in 1914, Ford relied on 15,000 machine tools, a greater number
than his total workforce of 13,000). 1 These developments led to the reconceptualization of
industrial space itself. As historian Lindy Biggs explains, the new buildings were designed
specifically to house assembly line production. Design and layout went hand -in-hand with
materials handling and internal flow, so when drafting new buildings for these systems
Ford's engineers thought about the factories a whole, seeing them as great master
machines. 2
The new plants looked different than the industrial facilities that preceded them. No
wonder that they attracted the attention of artists and photographers. One of the first and
most talented was Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), who both painted and photographed Ford’s
River Rouge complex in the late 1920s, emphasizing the plant’s sharply angled lines,
imposing towers, and the conveyors that moved parts inside the behemoth buildings (see
figure 1). Sheeler, like many artists of the time, celebrated the new precepts of Fordist
industrial design seeing the sleek new factories as a form of quasi-religious expression,
going so far as calling them the gothic cathedrals of the twentieth century, a sentiment that
comes through strongly in much of his work over the next two decades. 3
Figure 1. Charles Sheeler, Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company, 1927
2
Perhaps the most elegant effort to apply the new concepts of industrial design to a
mass production factory came from Italian architect Giocomo Mattè-Trucco (1869-1934)
whose Lingotto automobile plant, built for Fiat in Turin between 1916 and 1923 , drew
attention from other architects, photographers, and curious visitors from across the
continent. One Futurist designer called it “our liberation from esthetic terror,” and famed
French architect Le Corbusier pronounced it “one of the most impressive sights in industry,”
believing it could serve as guideline for future projects.4 Paying careful attention to the flow of
materials, Mattè-Trucco’s reinforced concrete structure had five floors and housed a
reversed assembly line that started at ground level and sloped up in helicoidal fashion
through the building. Finished cars rolled off the line at roof level, where there was a racing
track, surely the most unusual feature of the building and the one that occasioned the most
comment [see figures 3 and 4].
Figures 3 and 4. Photographer unknown, Fiat Lingotto Plant, c.1934, Baker Library Special, Harvard Business School
More important than the architect’s audacity of including a test track atop an auto plant is
the way in which the visual culture of Fordism rapidly spread beyond the United States. Indeed,
wherever “modernist” forms of design appeared, Fordist sensibilities were deeply inscribed. To
note two additional European examples: Renault’s Île Seguin factory southwest of Paris designed
by Albert Leprade (1883-1978) and German architect Peter Behrens’ (1868-1940) Linz, Austria,
tobacco factory, both erected in the 1920s, eschewed traditional forms and ornamentation, allowing
3
the structure of these facilities to follow the functions carried out inside them. Simplicity,
efficiency, and systemization were the guiding principles.5
While Fordist notions structured the built environment of the modern factory, sparking
comment and attracting tourists who marvelled even from the outside at the sleek lines and patterns
of glass, concrete, and steel, they had an even greater impact on those who laboured inside these
giant new facilities. The visual aspects of this interior dimension – to say nothing of the experience
of labour –is less documented and certainly attracted less attention at the time. Indeed, the paucity
of images depicting sentient human labour in industrial photography is notable and raises important
questions. How was labour represented in images of Fordist production? More importantly, where
do we see agency or praxis on the shop floor? To answer these queries, it is first necessary to
understand that the Fordist imaginary reduced labour to a mere input of production, a measurable
and standardized commodity rather than an independent agent. Thus, visual depictions of the shop
floor tend to see workers as regimented components of production, extensions of machines or, in
some extreme examples, as ancillary to the main story of the moving line, the forge, machine shop,
or furnace.
Some of the most striking photographs of the shop floor from the Fordist heyday amplify
the notion of the regimented worker. In the 1930s Ford sent a series of images to the Harvard
Business School for use in their case study approach to education. While Ford’s secretiveness about
his custom machine tools meant that few photographers gained access to the inside of the plants,
these images from both Highland Park and the River Rouge complex are unusual in the way they
capture parts assembly in detailed, almost artistic fashion. Figures 5 and 6, below, are standout
examples, with workers dressed identically, moving in similar fashion, and labouring on the same
products. In both images, the photographer’s use of leading lines and angles, and the visual capture
of the identical posturing of the subjects, accentuates the sense of labour as a component part of the
larger master machine of the factory. Given the off-limits nature of the auto plant interior, the
camera here – with its privileged access to the line -- has become party to the alienation and
regimentation of labour. Historian Erica Toffoli expresses this complicity in a powerful way,
writing that the creation of these sorts of photographs both separate workers from the commodities
they produce and freezes framed moments from the flow of time, abstracting them and enabling the
reproduction and circulation of images.6
4
Figures 5 and 6. Unknown Photographer, Glass Inspection, and Small Part Assembly, Ford Motor Company, c. 1929, Baker
Library, Harvard Business School
Of course workers, even those inside the early twentieth century’s rational factories, were never
simply cogs in larger machines or merely inputs into mass production. But in the dreams of
industrial engineers, they were but living extensions of their mechanical designs. Many of the
photographs in the Harvard collection capture something of this managerial fantasy. John P. Mudd
(1888-1955), an unusually talented but overlooked photographer, gained access to Midvale Steel’s
Philadelphia plant. In several of Mudd’s shots, his decision to crop his photographs in such a way
that headless workers’ hands and arms appear as extensions of machines amplify the idea that
labour is under the total control of Fordist design. Figure 7, for instance, depicts a workers’ arms
moving levers. A note on the back of the photograph makes clear that this is a result of conscious
deskilling: “The modern machine tool furnishes the operator with many feeds, speeds, and other
adjustments. In former times a change in speed was made by removing a gear from the machine
and substituting another from a collection hung on a rack nearby. Nowadays the shifting of a lever
accomplishes the same result; the operator never sees the gear.”7
5
Figure 7. John P. Mudd, untitled photograph, Midvale Steel, 1935, Baker Library. Harvard Business School
In its mature form, Fordism was more than an approach to rationalizing mass production
and applying scientific principles to the control of factory labour. It was also a visual style that
influenced modernism in urban architecture and, crucially, grew to become an accumulation regime
that linked high volumes of output with a growing consumer market. Here too photography played
a key role celebrating the look of the modern metropolis – Margaret Bourke-White’s (1904-1971)
Chrysler building photographs and Berenice Abbott’s (1898-1991) shots of New York’s bridges,
avenues, and skyscrapers come immediately to mind – and giving the Fordist imaginary room to
revel in new forms of urban consumption. Perhaps the ultimate institutional expression of this
phenomenon was the Automat, an urban cafeteria where food appeared in small glass-fronted
cubicles with patrons serving themselves rather than rely on wait staff. Self-service streamlined
food delivery and allowed efficiencies that kept prices down, but it was the experience and design
of the Automat that made it such a success. As its historian, Nicolas Bromel, describes them,
Automats were art deco palaces of glass and bevelled mirrors that allowed busy city dwellers to
dine quickly and comfortably in sparkling surroundings without having to interact with
disrespectful waiters or see their food handled by careless cooks. “The neon lights and modern
décor synonymous with the Automat reinforced the customers’ impression that the Automat was a
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scientific dining experience.” Mechanized service, inexpensive standardized fare, and a gleaming
atmosphere “instilled in customers a new expectation of cleanliness and efficiency.”8
If for no other reason, the repeating patterns and clean lines of the Automat drew
photographers to them. Berenice Abbott repeatedly shot the one located on New York’s Eighth
Avenue just below Columbus Circle [see figure 8], tending to focus on lone customers making
selections or putting a nickel in the pay slot. Photographers as diverse in style as Elliot Erwitt, and
Hikaru Iwasaki also recorded similar images between the 1930s and early 1960s, choosing to
foreground the consumer experience but always highlighting the Automat’s modernist design.9 A
recurring trope was photographs of celebrities choosing their food item, having a coffee dispensed,
or working a coin slot. Long after its novelty had worn off, the Automat continued to fascinate,
secure as a fixture of the urban experience.
Tellingly, the Automat was never truly automated. Rather, workers applied themselves out
of sight, behind the high-tech façade of the shiny glass cubicles. The antithesis of today’s open
kitchen restaurants, the Automat and its visual representations pushed workers beyond the margins
and completely out of the frame, holding forth a fantasy of mechanized food delivery in a spic and
span laboratory-like setting in which workers were absent. Indeed, the Automat presented its fare
in a seemingly pristine state, offering food, as one commentator noted, “that appeared to be
untouched by human hands.”10 And yet, just out of view Automat employees, under the direction of
managers, laboured in highly organized fashion that owed much to the sort of rationalization that
had been perfected in mass production industries.
7
Figure 8. Berenice Abbott, Automat 977 Eighth Avenue,1939, New York Public Library.
Indeed, Horn & Hardart, the parent company, spared no detail in its drive to standardize food
service and regiment cafeteria work. It developed recipes and processes in central commissaries,
regularly performed spot checks to maintain quality control, and wrote detailed manuals that
dictated even small tasks such as proper plating and garnishing. The genius of the Automat was not
that it dispensed with labour but that it perfected a modern, machine-age form of packaging. As
Carolyn De La Pena put it in another context, by “erasing labor and emphasizing machines, the new
physical space encouraged an intimate experience of industrial production that produced pleasure.
The exchange elevated customers' importance within the automated system and syncopated
production and consumption needs between man and machine.”11
Even the few extant photographs of the Automat’s food preparation area suggest that while
work needed to be performed to sustain the “front of house” illusion, even “back of house” labour
remained invisible. Figure 9, showing a later twentieth century view of the Automat kitchen on
New York’s 42nd Street, reveals a spotless facility, with bright fluorescent lights, shiny stainless
steel counters, uniform but empty plates, and an uncomfortably narrow galley. Cramped compared
to the spacious dining area on the other side, the kitchen is notable for the absence of cooks and, in
this image, the absence of food. Clearly, both have been removed, pushed beyond the frame of the
photograph, in preparation for the shot. Again, the camera allows the viewer privileged access to
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the usually off-limits world of work, but what is seen is artifice, an image that conforms to an
imaginary domain of industrial perfection.
Figure 9. Photographer unknown, 80 East 42 nd Street, 1955. New York Public Library
###
Industrial photography in the twentieth century, especially in its early decades, did not simply
reflect the new Fordist principles structuring production and consumption. It helped constitute that
new order in important ways. By creating, reproducing, and circulating images of novel sites of
production and consumption, photography naturalized this emerging regime and shaped a
modernist visual culture. The photographs of Ford’s Rouge complex or Mattè-Trucco’s Lingotto
plant allowed for a new way of seeing the factory, one that because of the giant scale of
these facilities eluded the unaided eye and stood beyond the sensory grasp of the individual.
A wide focal length could capture the entire plant or a significant portion of it in a way that
an abstract blueprint could not, enabling viewers privileged visual access to the structures
of mass production. Similarly, shots of the shop floor allowed viewers a glimpse into the
heart of Fordist production, but in a way that obscured the social dimension of labour and
obliterated any sense of agency beyond workers’ diligent attention to the line. So too, the
camera rendered visible the Automat’s invisible back of house – but even this Wizard of Oz
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like peek behind the curtain distorted the reality of the necessarily loud and messy kitchen
environment. Photography’s association with visual realism meant that these mirages could
be presented, intentionally or not, as natural and genuine. No doubt the technical marvel of
the camera itself – its precision tooling, sleek design, optical engineering, and diminishing
size – contributed to the illusion, rendering the medium a perfect component part of both
Fordist practice and imaginary.
REFERENCES:
1
Ford quoted in Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States. New York: Random
House, 329.
2
Lindy Biggs, The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology, and Work in America's Age of Mass Production.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, 118.
3
See Sheeler’s 1928 photograph of a ship titled “The Upper Deck,”
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/283297; and his 1945 painting “Water,” a depiction of a TVA dam,
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/488293.
Futurist quote from Nicolai Ouroussoff, “A Modernist Icon in Italy Is Resurrected for the 90s,” New York Times, 25
July 1993; Le Corbusier quote from “Fiat Lingotto Factory,” Architectuul, https://architectuul.com/architecture/fiatlingotto-factory. Additional photos of the Lingotto plant can be viewed here: https://public.fotki.com/RickHalpern/fiatlingotto/?view=roll
4
5
For Leprade’s Île Seguin facility see https://architectuul.com/architecture/the-ile-seguin-renault-factory; Behrens
tobacco factory, https://architectuul.com/architecture/tobacco-factory-linz.
6
Erica Toffoli, “Alienating Exposures: Photographing the Activity of Labor,” Photography and Culture 13:2 (April
2020), 197.
7
Item 3997, Box 54, Industrial Life Photograph Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Cambridge MA.
8
Nicolas Bromell, “The Automat: Preparing the Way for Fast Food,” New York History 81:3 (2000), 302-3.
9
Iwasaki’s images are interesting as he shot Japanese Americans consuming food in New York just after the period of
WWII internment. The anonymity of the Automat’s service experience made little distinction of race or ethnicity
amongst customers. Iwasaki photos, Online Archive of California, War Relocation Authority Photographs,
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft609nb34j/?brand=oac4
10
Jane and Michael Stern, “Cafeteria,” New Yorker (1 August 1988), 42.
11
Bromell, “Automat,” 303-4; Carolyn De La Pena, “Eating Technology at Krispy Kreme,” in Edge, Engelhardt, and
Ownby (eds). The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South. Athens GA: University of George Press,
2013, 203
10