ABSTRACT
This chapter intends to reclaim the critical potential of Charles Sheeler’s River Rouge photographs and paintings by reading, to an extent, against the grain of Adorno’s aesthetic theory. It argues against the perception of the commissioned River Rouge works as at best ambivalent about industrial capitalism or, at worst too much under the influence of capitalist ideology. Wolfgang Born goes as far as to argue that Sheeler’s photographs of the Rouge ‘raised industrial photography to the level of uncompromising artistic purity’. Consequently, Sheeler’s precisionist reinterpretations of these artistically pure photographs with their emphasis on further abstracting structural detail and simplifying architectural form, present the industrial landscape as beautiful. The fact that Sheeler was at work on Classic Landscape and the other Rouge works throughout the early 1930s, when the Depression was at its most severe and as strikes at Ford’s plant ended in violence and death, is particularly saddening.
