In 1941, the Rath Packing Company of Waterloo, Iowa published a book titled Waterloo Packer: The Story of the Rath Packing Company to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in the meatpacking industry. Modelled on Life magazine, Waterloo Packer co-opted the photoessay format to commercial ends. Examining archival documentation and looking at other American industrial publications, this article illuminates Waterloo Packer’s conception by executives of the Rath Company and consultants from advertising agency Young and Rubicam; and it contextualises Waterloo Packer as the most innovative of a series of ‘industrial biographies’ produced in the USA at midcentury. Through close reading of Waterloo Packer as phototext, this article demonstrates how the Rath Packing Company deployed photographic imagery to present a controlled and sanitised vision of industrial-scale slaughter.

This book is the first-ever in-depth analysis of the genesis, development and context of Smith and Thomson’s innovative publication. Now regarded as a pioneering photo-text and a foundational work of socially conscious photography – “one of the most significant and far-reaching photobooks in the medium’s history” (The Photobook: A History) – Street Life in London did not achieve commercial success in its own time. In Street Life in London we see the start, but not the conclusion, of a conversation between text and image in the service of education, reportage and social justice.

In the mid- to late 1960s and early 1970s, the American photographer Harry Callahan made a series of multiple-exposure images incorporating appropriated pictures from soft-core pornographic magazines. This was not his sole deployment of appropriated imagery: in the 1950s, he had produced a series for which he took images from women’s fashion magazines, and from the 1960s to the 1980s he made another series that incorporated pictures from his television screen. Despite this sustained interest, however, Callahan is not regarded as an appropriation artist. His work is generally seen as a lyrical modernism concerned almost exclusively with formal issues and personal expression.

There are several seemingly obvious connections between outlaws and artists: both have been mythologized through books, newspaper accounts, tabloid chronicles, talk show interviews, and movies depicting the positive and negative outcomes of their accomplishments; artists and outlaws alike tend to live according to their own rules; and outlaws, as well as some artists, tend to burn out early. These similarities are deeply rooted in public perception, self-awareness, and social and economic conditions.

MEATPACKING has long been a major Iowa industry. Archives in the state are replete with information about the industry, and many authors have documented its history and impact in the state.

The work depicted in this article results from collaboration among lipid scientists and an artist. The collaboration started seven years ago when Barbara Walton, an art professor at Iowa State University (ISU) in Ames, USA, read a news story about soywax candles with clean-burning properties characterized by a lipid professor at ISU, Tong Wang.