Snapshot Aesthetics and the Strategic Imagination

Abstract

This paper is concerned with photography as strategic imagery. Strategic imagery consists of images intended to persuade, promote, or otherwise perform strategic intentions. Encompassing advertising, billboards, packaging, promotional brochures, point of purchase displays, viral media, and website design, strategic imagery comprises a large portion of contemporary visual culture. Pictures of people– models, celebrity endorsers, spokespersons, " average " consumers, managers and employees—make up a large pfile:///Users/michaelascalisi/Desktop/Master Thesis/Snapshot Aesthetics and the Strategic Imagination.pdfart of this imagery 1 In turn, visual images constitute much strategicx imagery for products and services, about economic performance, or designed to promote organizational identity. Within this purview, advertising has long since moved beyond its traditional role of " showing products " or " informing " consumers. Much strategic imagery, of course, does not show products at all; instead, it encourages a range of aesthetic, cognitive and emotional effects to promote a vision of a brand's essential role in a good life. Much of this promotion depends upon visual style, how images appear, and how they fit into broader trajectories of visual culture. If we take a close look at how strategic imagery deploys the snapshot aesthetic, we gain insight into the flows between high and low forms of visual culture, into how photography itself interacts with, supports, and enhances corporate strategy, and how visual style articulates certain assumptions about the market. These articulations construct viewers as consumers by addressing the subject of snapshot aesthetics as a consuming subject. The snapshot's insistence upon lived experience, or what has been called " the rhetoric of authenticity, " underlies its usefulness in illustrating and marketing consumer experience. 2