Photography and Design

The Construction of the Industrial Product Image

Abstract

The issue of AIS / Design Journal on the history of design photography was born on the impulse of a finally explicit and full recognition, which occurred in recent times, of the role of photography in the development of design culture. We have finally become aware of the not only commercial function of product images and the virtuous interweaving that photography establishes with editorial and advertising graphics. This recognition might not have been so open if, in the last ten to fifteen years, a series of archives of photographers had not been handled who had made design their main field of application, revealing its absolute authorial quality. The prejudice that saw design photography as a “minor genre” was thus broken, to which the pre-eminent commercial purpose and the fact that it was performed on commission had helped to relegate it. A not secondary thrust then came from the increasing attention of scholars towards the activity of graphic designers and art directors, through research that brought to light the specific weight of photography in the construction of communicative artefacts of various kinds, from sector magazines to company house organs, to posters and communication campaigns, to end up in the field of advertising, long considered collateral, if not conflicting, with respect to the graphic design of the author...