Harvard Business School Baker Library Historical Collections

The Human Factor

Introducing the Industrial Life Photograph Collection at the Baker Library

• Introduction
• The Exhibition
  • The Request
  • The Response
    • Chapter Introduction
    • Chapter Images
  • The Collection
  • The Medium
  • The Message
  • The Product
  • The Production
  • The Worker
  • The Audience
• Bibliography

The Response: The Public Relations File

Thus it is a fact and no mere boast that Kraft advertisements proclaim in the statement:
The world's finest cheeses are made or imported by Kraft. manipulate them.

Publicity departments responding to the Business Historical Society’s request for photographs typically sent a generous series of images that conveyed a persuasive story of corporate success. The Kraft-Phenix Corporation sent its 1933 company brochure, “The Story of Kraft,” together with the original photographic prints that had appeared in the publication. The sharp, crisp photographs, complemented by the brochure’s clean, graphic design, led readers through a series of manufacturing steps: from the careful selecting and breaking of eggs to the expert blending of the ingredients of mayonnaise; from the production of bulk cheese to the international distribution of “air-tight, dust-proofed, sanitary packages.”

The U.S. Steel Corporation provided a series of oversized prints of Carnegie Steel by Russell Aikins. The magnificent views bring into bold relief the seemingly infinitesimal scale of human figures working within the dynamic forces of furious heat and colossal machines. Aikins’ depictions of gigantic factory spaces, filtered with light and smoke, illustrate the stages of steel production that workers described as both beautiful and terrible.

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