Imaging Animal Industry focuses on the visual culture of the American meat industry between 1890 and 1960. It describes how, during that period, photographs and other images helped to shape public perceptions of industrial-scale meat production. Although the meat industry today bans most photography at its facilities, in the past this was not always the case: the meat industry not only tolerated but welcomed cameras. Meatpacking companies and industry organizations regarded photographs as useful tools for creating and managing a vision of their activities, their innovations, and their contributions to the march of American economic and industrial progress.
Drawing on archival collections across the American Midwest, this book relates a history of the meatpacking industry鈥檚 use of images in the early to mid-twentieth century. In the process, it reveals the key role that images, particularly photographs, have played in assisting with the rise of industrial meat production.
鈥淕iven Iowa鈥檚 increasing importance as a meat industry state, especially after the collapse a half-century ago of the Chicago meatpacking industry, it deserves the attention Morgan provides in this mixture of illustrations and text. Her expertise in visual materials informs her analysis of these resources played and play in the process stretching from producer to consumer. Those interested in labor history as well as art history will find much to appreciate. . . . Reaching far back to the earliest illustrations of meat processing in past centuries, Morgan helps a reader understand how consumers have accepted a violent industrial process filled even in current times with significant issues of health and worker safety.鈥濃Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society
