This Was Corporate America.

Text and photographs by Chauncey Hare. Afterword by Judy Wyatt.

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1984. English, 96 pp., 8½x10½".

"The working people in the series of photographs [Chauncey Hare] shot at Standard Oil sit in mundane, if vaguely menacing, office environments, boxed in — sometimes even obscured — by a labyrinth of cubicles and other corporate furniture. They rarely look directly at the camera; many of his photographs seem to be taken from above. To look at these workers is to supervise, to surveil. Still, close inspection reveals glimpses of personality in the otherwise dreary tableaus — a playful cheetah print here, a holiday wreath there."

— Hannah Giorgis, The Atlantic APRIL 8, 2022

In this extraordinarily personal book, Chauncey Hare details his immediate past history. We see Hare's self-portraits at work at the Environmental Protection Agency and in his apartment. These self-portraits introduce Hare's text, a combination of self-analysis and critical assessment of his involvement with corporate America, and the photographic art world of Aperture, the Museum of Modern Art, and the graduate program at the San Francisco Art Institute. Following Hare's texts is a selection of his more recent photographs, made at the Standard Oil Company of California, the Social Security Administration, in various electronics industries, and finally, photographs of commuters on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. Many of these photographs visually parallel the isolation Hare finds in contemporary America, while his writing gives a lucid and deeply personal account of one photographer's encounter with the art and corporate worlds.

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