Snapshot Aesthetics and the Strategic Imagination

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 employeesmake up a large part of this imagery. 1 In turn, visual images constitute much strategic 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.