This Was Corporate America By Chauncey Hare
oblong, 4to. pp. 94. b/w illustrations. paperback (near fine - some creases and light wear to covers). Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, [1984].
ISBN-10: 0910663408 / ISBN-13: 9780910663403
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Chauncey Hare (1934-2019) was an American fine-art photographer best know for his photographs of office spaces and corporate life.
Born in Niagara Falls, New York, Hare received B.A. and B.S. degrees at Columbia University, majoring in engineering. For twenty-one years he worked as a research engineer for the Standard Oil Company of California, which he joined in 1956. Two years after hiring on at Standard he began photography as an escape from the engineering routine. Hare first photographed landscapes, then interior homes of neighbours near the refinery in Richmond, California where he worked. Slowly he became aware of the connection between his own job dissatisfaction and the emptiness of the lives of the people he photographed. He left Standard in 1977. During the time of this publication, Hare was employed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as an environmental engineer.
Beginning in 1965 Hare has had a number of one-person exhibitions in San Francisco and in New York. In 1969 he received the first of three Guggenheim Fellowships to photograph American living environments. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships to photograph working environments.
Hare's book, Interior America, published for Aperture in 1978, has been called, "one of the chief, choice books of modern photography," and "the successor Walker Evans' American Photographs and Robert Franks' The Americans."
In 1985, not long after This Was Corporate America was published, Hare stopped making photographs altogether and earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology.