[Photographic Identification Badge from Independent Packaging Company, St. Louis, Missouri]

From its beginnings in 1839, the medium of photography has served multiple masters; artists wanting to make quick sketches of figures, architecture, and landscape; the press which has desired timely illustrations to help chronicle and sell the daily news; and even the courts which gather photographs as evidence of innocence or guilt. These identification badges represent a type of vernacular photographic portraiture that has been undertaken by American employers since the late 1910s to identify their workers and protect their businesses. (The Metropolitan's own staff ID badge and swipe card is merely the current version of these photographic pin badges.) In these small, intimate portraits, a suite of average American workers stand at attention, identified at times by their name, but always by their particular physiognomy,　employee number, and by the idiosyncratic font and name of the company for which they worked. In their marvelous, colorful, and oxidized cast metal frames (from the Goshen Rubber Co. to General Motors to the Raymond Bag Co. in Middletown, Ohio), these portraits unconsciously record the claustrophobia of a nation caught between the Great Depression and World War II. Equally importantly, they reveal a typology of the individual worker at a time when the United States had what was arguably most resourceful and versatile body of labor in the world.

Credit: Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2011