This article analyzes how Colombian entrepreneurs used documentary photography to forge a distinctive guild identity between 1945 and 1960. As part of a wider set of internal strategies designed to unify the recently legitimated goals of the industrial elite, photography contributed to establish visual references associated with the promise of modernity. The entrepreneurs embodied and assimilated such references in order to strengthen their self-perception as a group and to distinguish themselves from other guilds. The primary sources this article is built on are texts and images derived from entrepreneurial magazines, whose styles and modalities of self-representation will be analyzed in detail.
