Imaging Animal Industry

An ambitious book, Imaging Animal Industry is about how meatpacking corporations saw themselves in the early to mid 20th Century. It looks at the different sorts of images about the business, mostly photography and mostly produced by the industry itself. It studies the messages of the images, both assumed and intended, as well as the ways that different images worked for the industry in different contexts.

The sweep of the criticism here is broad. A theme that comes up frequently is the way in which animal is turned into material: you have a living, feeling creature, the arcanum arcanorum happens, and then you have a product to sell in a store for consumers. But some of the best material here is in the comparison of photos in different context. What goes in a brochure to investors is not what goes in a press package, even if the two things look structurally similar. Wisely, the author refrains from getting overly cynical about this. The messages can be propagandizing, but are equally as representative of unstated biases and beliefs.

The selected photography is excellent. It is also distributed well, in terms of having the discussion and the artwork proximate to one another. Yes, it might not be your thing what with the killing and all. But one of the book's arguments is about how the meatpacking business wanted to see itself as capital-I Industry. The result is some highly artful work. This extends to a number of photos taken of the workers out of projects usually related to a labor organization, (though the presentation of these photos is often not as detailed as the others in the book). And to restate the previous paragraph somewhat, it is not a simple they all death scenes of pigs versus they only show gleaming unused machines, but always a nuanced presentation to suit the perceived work of the photo.

The first chapter is the strongest, in getting into the breath of the analysis on tap and where to apply it. The chapter on gender and advertising is the weakest. It has some of the most interesting one-off pieces of material, particularly in regards to race, but much of the material here is out of line with the rest of the material in the book.

This is an academic book. This will put off some people. And like any book of criticism, not all the ideas land as well as others. Some I disagree with, or I think that there are good alternative sets of critical tools to look at something with. So your interest in this book may correlate to you interest in enacting a stockyards-like rendering process upon food-industry visual fluff. But for providing a way of thinking about what is not thought about, it serves a useful purpose, if you want to consider the unconsidered.

My thanks to the author, Emily Kathryn Morgan, for writing the book and to the publisher, University of Iowa Press, for making the ARC available to me.

Imaging animal industry is an in depth look at the way the meatpacking industry has developed and used images to promote and further its business in America through the ages.

The book is mainly focused on the images put out by the companies themselves, rather than any images taken by activists etc opposing industry. This is made clear fairly early on but I would have loved a chapter on how images were turned against the industry when it had been actively used to promote.

The book goes through the history of meat consumption in the US and the shift from animal to product in advertising and how meat became a staple in the diet of many in the 1900s. It looks at imaging used to attract sales and now stereotypes play into these roles. The elements of racism and misogyny both within the industry and the image they create for themselves is explored in detail.. The research is really thorough and well done, and you can tell there is a high academic level to this work.