Image Worlds Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890-1930 - MIT Press

By viewing the corporation as a communicator, Image Worlds links the histories of labor, business, consumption, engineering, and photography, providing a new perspective on one of the largest and most representative corporations.General Electric was one of the first modern industrial corporations to use photographs and other media resources to create images of itself; and the GE archives, comprising well over a million images, form one of the largest privately held collections in the world. To produce this venturesome book, David Nye has used these vast archives to develop a new approach to corporate ideology through corporate iconography.Image Worlds embraces symbols, intentional signs, and photographs on the one hand and the history of institutional and technological development on the other. It views photography as a developing technology with a history of its own, and presents the corporation as a communicator as well as a producer