This is Corporate America: The Intertwined Histories of Photography and the Office

In the mid-1980s, Chauncey Hare could boast an enviable résumé for a fine-art photographer: multiple Gug­genheim and NEA fellowships, exhibitions at major institutions, and the publication of Interior America (1978) and This Was Corporate America (1984). He had pared down his full-time position in environmental engineering to three days a week and was preparing to quit altogether.

But Hare was not leaving his office job to pursue a romantic dream of creative freedom. Instead he would question the very foundations of art-world success—picketing museums where his work was on display, defacing books in which his photographs appeared—and study organizational development at Pepperdine University. In 1985, not long after This Was Corporate America appeared, Hare stopped making photographs altogether and earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology. He now works as a therapist, counseling people on what he terms “work abuse.”

Hare gave up on art’s potential to effect change, and his arresting photographs are little known. But with the just-released Protest Photographs (Steidl), Hare reiterates his demand that society pay attention to the working people and conditions he depicted so mercilessly. This may well be his final statement as a photographer, but one of his key themes—the office environment—has been taken up by a new generation of artists for reasons of their own.

Though offices have long been recognized as stages for significant social interaction and identity formation, they are still regarded as neutral, functional spaces. Likewise, depictions of offices are dismissed as boring and formulaic. The upholding of these assumptions by workers and designers alike indicates a collective refusal to acknowledge the tensions—personal, social, and spatial—that suffuse all offices.

Until recently, that is. In novels, films, television series, art galleries, blogs, and elsewhere, the office setting has become a subject in itself. The moment Hare despaired of ever seeing seems finally to have arrived.

Offices and photography, both originating in the Industrial Revolution and flourishing in the resultant capitalist economy, have intertwined histories. Offices in the modern sense (designated places, outside the domestic sphere, for the non-manufacturing work of managers, clerks, typists, and so forth) became necessary in the last third of the nineteenth century, when a goods-based economy shifted to a service-based one. Initially, spaces once used for storage, sorting, or packing were retrofitted with the trappings of intellectual labor: wood paneling, coffered ceilings, rolltop desks with bankers’ lamps. The first purpose-built office building, New York’s Equitable, opened in 1870, with the first passenger elevators providing access to its seven stories. During this same period many other inventions—the telegraph (1844), manual pencil sharpener (1847), typewriter (1860), coffee percolator (1865), telephone...