[Textile Factory Interior]

Founded in Lyon in 1888, Atuyer, Bianchini, Férier was one of the top silk-weaving houses of its time, with offices in Paris, London, Brussels, and New York. The firm probably commissioned this photograph of the interior of its factory in New York. The unknown photographer demonstrated an appreciation of the clarity, clean lines, and precise geometrical volumes that found full fruition in the work of the New Vision photographs of the 1920s, but in this case the intention seems to have been to create laudatory records of the company's orderly factories.
This "official" view of factory conditions offers an instructive comparison to Lewis Hine's photographic documentation of child labor in American factories during the same period. It is also interesting to note that the photograph was probably taken in the era of labor unionizing and reform that followed the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory on March 25, 1911, a tragedy that permanently transformed the public's image of textile factories. It may have been commissioned to counter the public impression of textile factories as places of danger and disorder.