Rationalizing Consumption: Lejaren à Hiller and the Origins of American Advertising Photography, 1913–1924

The reasons why photographic illustration was generally avoided by American print advertisers before 1913, even though halftone technology had made such illustration economically advantageous, have not been adequately explored. This article explains that art directors initially avoided the medium because of its slavish dependence on material reality. Photography offered too much detail; it seemed incapable of the abstraction or idealization necessary for “capitalist realism.” The change in this outlook can be dated from the work of Lejaren à Hiller, who, borrowing fine art aesthetics and techniques from pictorialist photography, established the medium as suitable for the complex visual and narrative strategies required by the social tableaux advertising of the period.