Modern artists have a love-hate relationship with business. Painters like Charles Sheeler saw the beauty in the fearful symmetry of modern factory design, and many more artists have embraced the fortunes which have made sharks floating in formaldehyde as precious as gold.

Yet today bohemia is largely hostile to commerce, and artists are supposed to shun the subventions of the affluent, who in the past commissioned some of the greatest works ever created, in order to pursue their own vision alone. Then there was Bill Wood, who for more than 30 years ran a thriving commercial photography business in Fort Worth, Texas, where he shot what people paid him to shoot—including sales meetings, ribbon cuttings, funeral homes, and dachshunds. Every print was stamped on the back: “Another Picture Took by Bill Wood.”

Wood died in 1973 and in all likelihood had no idea that he was creating one of the largest, quirkiest, and most innocently artful records of mid-century middle-class life. Nor could he have imagined that the 20,000 negatives he left (only the surviving part of his larger life’s work) would be acquired by the actress Diane Keaton, or that she would present them to New York’s International Center of Photography, where a selection would comprise the remarkable exhibition “Bill Wood’s Business” (through September 7).

Wood’s images strike a useful blow at one of our most enduring myths, which is that art and commerce are always at loggerheads. On the contrary, portrait painters, composers, and architects have long worked on a commission system, and Wood is no different. Think of him as a kind of democratic John Singer Sargent, working quickly, cheerfully, and affordably in the democratic medium of photography to immortalize the rising middle class. Through his commercial lens a sharp, sad, funny, mysterious, and—yes—helplessly artistic vision emerges. 

Daniel Akst is a writer living in New York. He is the author of three books, including The Webster Chroncicle, which was among the Washington Post's notable books of 2002.

Photographs © Billye Cooper and Connie Bruner; International Center of Photography; promised gift of Diane Keaton.