Photogram (Cigarettes, Hands, and Matches)

Gordon H. Coster was a prominent commercial photographer, who spent the majority of his career working in Chicago, from the mid-1920s to the mid-1980s. In 1929, he joined the picture agency of Underwood & Underwood, supplying advertising photographs for the agency’s New York and Chicago offices for many years. In 1936, he opened his own photography studio in Chicago, where he did much of the photography for Marshall Field & Company and other large Chicago institutions. He had a long, successful career in advertising, industrial photography, and photojournalism, moving between different photographic genres and styles, as evidenced by the photogram seen here.