Interactions of photography and the mass media, 1920-1941: The early career of Ralph Steiner

This dissertation examines the career of the American photographer Ralph Steiner (1899-1986), whose work exemplifies the medium's complex role during the 1920s and 1930s. For him, photography served as a medium of modernist art, a favored tool of documentary practice, and a ubiquitous presence in mass circulation periodicals and advertising.;A successful commercial photographer, Steiner also exhibited and published images as authored works of art. In the 1920s, he employed many of the same technical and stylistic devices in both, effectively collapsing distinctions between commercial and fine art practice. By the end of that decade and during the 1930s, however, Steiner--influenced by socialist critiques of consumer culture--began to differentiate his independent photography from commercial assignments. Now embracing a realist aesthetic, he would, nonetheless, continue to draw on the visual culture of advertising and other forms of pictorial persuasion as key themes in his photographs and in criticism.;In tracing Steiner's career, this study gauges his changing approach to photographic practice. Chapter One examines his education in 1921 to 1922 at the Clarence H. White School of Photography, where the curriculum emphasized commercial applications. Chapter Two analyses Steiner's commercial work for mass circulation women's magazines demonstrating how these images contributed to the promotion of a consumer ethos to American women. A third chapter surveys Steiner's photographs of architecture and machine iconography illustrating that distinctions between commercial and fine art practice were often fluid in photography of the interwar years. Chapter Four discusses Steiner's independent images of advertising, a body of work which indexes the photographer's growing disdain for commercial visual culture. The final chapter examines Steiner's critical writing for the newspaper PM from 1940 to 1942, where he fully articulated a distrust of propagandistic applications of photography--including commercial forms--in favor of social documentary practice.