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1918–1991 — the industrial image record
Seventy tons, no names: The great companies photographed themselves constantly — product lines, plants, advertising, engineering — and Studebaker's photographic output survives inside the archive the company gave the City of South Bend with the vehicle collection when the end came: the museum archive that The History Museum and the Studebaker National Museum administer, running to more than seventy tons of papers, photographs among them. The Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis holds a separate, smaller piece: the Studebaker Visual Materials Collection (P 0704), dated 1918–1991. What neither record does is name the men and women behind the cameras. No Studebaker staff photographer is named in the records reached — not in the museum's own descriptions, not in the society's finding aid — and the same silence covers Bendix, whose wartime women workers survive through George Strock's LIFE visit rather than through a company archive's credits. The industrial image record of South Bend is thus enormous and anonymous: tens of tons of professional photography, made by professionals whose names the keeping institutions' published records do not carry.
Sources:
- The History Museum / Studebaker National Museum — the museum archive's own description: the Studebaker archives given to the City of South Bend with the vehicle collection; more than seventy tons of papers, including photographs; no staff photographer named.
- Indiana Historical Society — Studebaker Visual Materials Collection (P 0704), 1918–1991, finding aid.
- Cross-reference: Museums — the Studebaker archive's keeper and the vehicle collection.