Portraits of power: an analysis of photos of top managers over time
Or how Paul Auster taught me to look at the world differently
(French version here 🇫🇷)
When I learned of Paul Auster’s death last week, I immediately thought back to my high school English class in 2003. His novel “Moon Palace” was on the syllabus at the time, and frankly, I didn’t understand much of it.
I may have been valedictorian, I may have devoted the next ten years of my life to literature and linguistics, but at that time, in 2003, I was a naive 17-year-old who thought she understood everything about life and yet knew nothing. I particularly remember the moment during a class when our teacher showed us a black-and-white portrait of Paul Auster and asked us what the photo inspired in us.
As much as I’d always loved intellectual challenges, I found this question downright stupid, because what could there possibly be to interpret in a portrait of a writer? He looked the way he looked and it was a camera that had captured him as he was, looking straight into the lens, the frame cut off in the middle of his torso. Nothing special, just another photo like the hundreds you see in books, magazines and posters.
Except I had no idea that in everything man creates, there is always a choice. Nothing is necessarily this way and no other in a product of the human mind, and this was also the case for this photo. That’s what I didn’t know at the time. Why wasn’t Auster wearing a carnival costume in this photo, for example? Why wasn’t he framed from head to toe, smiling instead of frowning? Why wasn’t it a full-color photo in a leisure setting, say at the beach? And couldn’t it have been a photo of the writer surrounded by his wife and cat, sitting at his desk with a typewriter in front of him?
Today I could fill pages with more or less erudite answers to this question, and I’d surely say things like “the extreme reduction of the chromatic palette brings us back to the existentialist questions posed by the author in his work” or “the writer’s open but questioning gaze seems to want to enter into a dialogue with the reader and ask: are you simply alive as I am?” In short, I’ve come to understand that even the most banal-looking photo always conveys a message. It always tells us the choices the photographer has made: to focus on one detail rather than another, to show the subject in a more or less favorable light, to respect certain traditions or to propose something never seen before.
From the author’s photo to the manager’s portrait
So what about the professional world, and more specifically managerial photography? Where do they come from? Has a photo of a manager, boss or director always followed the same codes? And what do they tell us about the profession of the person pictured?
At first glance, when you enter “manager” or “boss” today in Google’s image search or on Stock photos, you’ll find more than homogenous results:
- a man or sometimes a woman in a suit (that’s a professional and successful person)
- in front of a bright, wide-angle background, such as his or her offices (someone in an intellectual profession, far from the sludge of factories)
- often with arms crossed (a determined person)
- a big smile on their face (this person is motivated and friendly)
The manager is most often depicted alone, although there are exceptions such as in the world of start-ups, where founders are shown surrounded by their entire teams or a few collaborators in a peer-to-peer meeting situation, wearing the same corporate sweatshirts.
What tradition are these photos part of?
Going back in history, we quickly realize that 15 years ago, manager photos were already virtually identical:
The postures, the looks, the framing, everything resembles what we still see today, except possibly the background, which in the 2000s was often a flat color that gave the photo almost no depth, in contrast to today’s play on perspective, which has become the norm with the development of digital photography.
Unsurprisingly, the same is true of the 1990s, even if, as here in l’Usine Nouvelle, the leading French magazine for industry professionals, some elements of the background recall the sector of activity of the person depicted (a miniature rocket, a building facade, a metal pipe).
Even further back in history, nothing radically different either. Photographs from the 1930s to the 1970s are composed of the same elements as those of the following decades, minus the smile of the person photographed. Even more often than today, we find staged images of the manager’s authority over a particular person: the boss handing a document to his secretary, for example, or the executive surrounded by a group of young businessmen. If it’s not the employees, it’s the décor that reinforces the symbolism of power: a massive desk, documents to sign, a beautiful painting on the wall. Far from being specific to France, this iconographic language is common to all countries of European or North American culture, as can be seen by looking at the examples below:
So the job of manager or company director hasn’t changed at all over the course of history? After all, digitalization, managerial practices and even the architectural design of our workplaces are not at all the same as they were 80 years ago!
If I were to ask you to imagine a random job, such as a doctor in the 1950s, the image you’d have in your head would surely be fundamentally different from that of a doctor in 2024.
So why is the image of a manager’s job so resistant to the signs of the times?
Being a manager is not a job
Scoop: it’s not a job. Iconically speaking, anyway. How’s that? Give me a minute and I’ll explain.
When you search for the term “trade” or “profession” in the archives, you’ll find a whole range of different images, starting with the 19th century, giving you a snapshot of the state of the art of a trade at a given moment in time, and of the person practicing that trade.
These engravings or photographs of professions always show :
- a specific location (workshop, factory, store, hairdresser’s salon, etc.). Unlike the manager with his interchangeable office towers, the worker is tied to a very specific location: he or she can’t practice their trade from wherever they like, they’re no digital nomads or intellectual workers.
- the tools needed to do the job: a computer can be a tool, of course, and we often see images of managers with pen in hand or telephone beside them on the desk, but in absolute terms, these accessories are not essential for identification. A manager without a pen in hand lacks nothing. A lady in a white coat, on the other hand, could be a hairdresser, veterinary surgeon, baker, etc.: without a specific tool, it’s not the same profession.
- professional clothing: blouse, apron, chef’s hat, overalls, uniform, etc. If clothes make the man, they also make the butcher, the cook, the police officer. Of course, the suit and tie can be considered workwear, but it doesn’t vary according to hierarchical level or function, e.g. sales, finance or IT. It’s the same everywhere. What’s more, the suit-tie or costume doesn’t refer to a professional context per se; it can also be worn in a private context.
If the portrait of the manager doesn’t show us someone in a specific profession, what does it show us?
This is where history provides us with some interesting answers. The uniform suit, the determined gaze, the symbols of power: the photo of the manager borrows more from the image of the political or military leader than from that of the worker. This becomes even more obvious when you put the two side by side.
By making this reference to traditional command functions, the authors of the manager photos imply that there are a number of parallels between the two:
- the general manager, like the commanding general, is at the top of a rather solid hierarchy. He masters the codes of his institution to perfection and has arrived there thanks to his skills
- the position confers considerable authority, requiring seriousness and responsibility
- in both cases, he’s someone who makes important decisions every day, and who knows how to assert himself
- someone capable of changing the destiny of many people, someone who will go down in history.
What to remember?
What the photos of managers tell us throughout history is that, firstly, the manager’s profession is not distinguished by a specific technique or work tool. However, there is a visible distinction in the photos: that of social status and hierarchical influence over others. This aspect is further reinforced by deliberate references to the visual world of politics and the military.
More than an activity, being a manager is therefore a state, a way of being, something that has more to do with a person’s essence than with what he or she does, according to these photos.
Does this mean that a manager “does nothing” and rests on his or her symbolic achievements? Of course not, but these images also tell us that a manager’s main activity escapes visual representation. Being fundamentally intellectual (managing teams and performance, reporting, developing a vision, communicating corporate strategy, etc.), a photo cannot “show” what it means to work as a manager. As a substitute, it has to focus on the only visible differentiator of the manager — his or her face. Hence the number of similar portraits, hence the consistency over time, hence the emphasis on the person’s status.
Now one could write entire books about the iconography of the powerful, from the portraits of kings to the Instagram accounts of today’s leaders. But what I really wanted to do was to take you on a tour of twentieth-century photographs of managers, and above all to tell you how Paul Auster taught me to look at the world differently.
After all, Paul Auster’s portrait could have been that of a manager, don’t you think?
