This paper looks at a specific set of corporate images, namely photographs of apprentices of the Luxembourg steel conglomerate ARBED, and analyses how young workers are depicted in these images. The paper draws on a collection of 2251 glass-plate negatives (re)presenting ARBED's industrial cosmos, including its vocational school the Institut Emile…

This article examines how and to what extent Luxembourg society was "exposed" to visual representations of the prospering steel industries and labour and working-class culture(s) from the 1880s until the 1920s--a period of massive industrialisation--and how it thus gradually "learned to labour". Indeed, modern visual media were…