[Photographic Identification Badge from an American Corporation]

Electronic photo ID cards are only the latest examples of a mode of portraiture that dates back to the 1910s, when employers first began using photography to identify the American workforce. This badge is from a group which spans the first five decades of the genre. In them, typefaces and hairdos fall in and out of fashion, uniforms change, but the style of the photographs themselves shows surprisingly little evolution. A suite of workers stands at attention, identified at times by their names or employee numbers, but always by their particular physiology. They stare out from frames emblazoned with familiar and forgotten corporate iconography, tracing a typological history of American labor.