Selling the Story: Commercial Pictures and Visual Persuasion

Workshop: Persuasion and American Images

Wednesday, March 11

2:00-5:00pm

THH 309K

Organized by Ellen Macfarlane (VSRI Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar) with papers by Lauren Kroiz (History of Art Department, UC Berkeley), Cara Finnegan (Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and Sally Stein (Professor Emerita, Department of Art History, UC Irvine)

This workshop brings together scholars of American visual culture to present new research in the area of visual persuasion. Exploring illustration, painting, and photography in artistic and commercial contexts, the workshop is an effort to critically evaluate the role of historical images in influencing public opinion and belief. The papers consider issues including labor and visibility, national identity, and public persona to explore how different forms of media have been enlisted to narrate knowledge for an American public. Lauren Kroiz (History of Art Department, University of California, Berkeley), “Living Laundry Soaps: Unruly Animation and Invisible Labor in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Advertising Trade Cards (1891-1893)”; Cara Finnegan (Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), “The Candid Camera Presidents: Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt”; and Sally Stein (Professor Emerita, Department of Art History, University of California, Irvine),“For Love or Money? Gisèle Freund’s Paradoxical Turn From Her Chromophobic, Marxist Study of The Rise of 19th-century Photography in France to her Pioneering Pursuit of Photographic Portraiture in Color.”