Selling Pictures. Pictorial Economy and Commoditization 1820-2020

This project traces the genealogy of contemporary “AI-generated” image hype back through 200-years of promoting technologies for the production, reproduction, and circulation of pictures on a mass scale.

Its overall aim is to understand the historical role of pictures, not simply as commodities, but as agents of commerce: Pictures that do the work of selling.

Focusing on emerging picture techniques in the 1820s,1920s, and 2020s, this study mines the combined histories of printing, photography, and advertising for examples of metapictures and vernacular picture theories that either display or assert the selling power of pictures in advertisements or commercially oriented publications, such as trade journals.

By identifying iconographic and discursive patterns in pictures of pictorial mass reproduction (metapictures), and comparing and combining picture theories expressed in advertising copy and trade journalism (vernacular picture theories) with canonical picture theories, the study will establish a new analytical vocabulary, rooted in historical material practices, that will clarify and expand understandings of how and why pictures do so much of the work of selling in modern and contemporary societies.

This outcome is achieved through an innovative and cross-disciplinary methodology, incorporating materials and theoretical approaches from advertising history, political economy, and the history of technology alongside picture theory, media studies, visual culture studies.