A Backroom Service?

The Photographic Library of the Council of Industrial Design now forms part of the Design Council Archive at the University of Brighton. This essay examines the early years of the Library concentrating on the reasons for its formation and the acquisition, classification and distribution of photography. I argue that the Council's dependence on photography was bound up in its wish to promote a particular formalist point of view that manifested itself in the reproduction of industrial design by photographic means. The Council promoted a 'way of seeing' as much as the industrially designed products it represented and photography became the key currency in this process, providing evidence of the Council's mediation between manufacturers and consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]