| This dissertation expands upon scholarship that understands class as less a cohesive socio-economic reality or ontological category than a set of always fluctuating behaviors to which one may or may not have access when crafting a social self. Exploring the ways in which visual culture is implicated in the making and remaking of class, which includes the subtle nuances of living class day-to-day, this study argues that photographic practices provide myriad opportunities for both individuals and communities to creatively fashion classed selves through both picture making and picture viewing. As a means of exploring the visual side of class making, this study examines three types of photographic archives (private/vernacular, educational/entertainment, industrial/commercial) that are shaped around (and therefore also shape) the concept of labor---a flexible concept functioning at the level of myth that (in a capitalist culture) is used to mobilize grand narratives of race, gender, power, and personhood. Taking into account the means by which these photographs came to be constructed/archived and the viewing communities/practices they encouraged, this dissertation argues that, despite their many idiosyncrasies, they carried so much cultural weight because they were able to shape an idealized "working class hero"---a symbol that began as a bourgeois construct but, through the mediation of photographic technology, quickly became a visual model to all those striving for social standing in a highly charged, economic milieu.;Chapter one sees the "working class hero" as performed in the popular genre of the 1850s to 1870s occupational tintype portrait, depicting primarily young, white men self-defining as "worker." Chapter two looks at the "working class hero" in turn-of-the-century American stereographic cards, illustrating accompanying text on U.S. imperialism and showing compliant, colonized Filipino laborers at work. Chapter three grapples with the "working class hero" in the 1920s industrial Welfare Work archives of the National Cash Register and Heinz companies. Finally, the epilogue traces the "working class hero" in the contemporary, digital, media archives of Corbis and Getty Images---suggesting that this pervasive and flexible symbol continues to captivate audiences from all socio-economic levels as the prevailing visual archetype of success in consumer capitalism. |
