Margaret Bourke-White's early works

Margaret Bourke-White's early development led to her emergence as one of the 20th century's best-known female photographers. She strode brazenly into a field dominated by men to become not only a famous photojournalist, but a celebrity personality. Trained in modernist compositional techniques, Bourke-White photographed with an artist's eye, discovering beauty in the raw aesthetic of American industry and its factories. She romanticized the power of machines through close-ups, dramatic cross-lighting, and unusual perspectives, presenting industrial environments as artful compositions. These images revealed her grasp of modern design and aesthetics, catching the eye of corporate executives and magazine publishers, ultimately landing her the position of Life magazine's first cover photographer.

While many photographers in the 1910s and 1920s, including Paul Strand and Lewis Hine, were drawn to the subject of American industry, Bourke-White alone celebrated the graphic power of its raw machinery over the human element that drove it. Her 1929 photograph "Chrysler, Gears" emphasizes the immensity of the gear--the worker, placed barely inside the frame, there only to provide a sense of scale.

By 1928, Bourke-White's photographs were appearing in newspapers and magazines across the country. From 1928 until 1936, she supported herself through corporate and magazine assignments and advertising shoots. Her magazine assignments, though less lucrative than the corporate ones, allowed for abstraction and compositional freedom. In these forceful works, it is apparent that she understood the drama of the diagonal and the curve. She framed many of her photographs so that similarly shaped forms appeared repeatedly on a diagonal across the field of view and seemed to continue into infinite space beyond. In "Oliver Chilled Plow: Plow Blades," a close-up of the shiny steel surfaces verges on complete abstraction.

In 1929, Bourke-White was invited to become the "star photographer" for the new Luce publication, Fortune magazine. Henry Luce's plan was to use photography to document all aspects of business and industry, an idea that had never been tried before. Bourke-White's career is unimaginable without her relationship with Luce's media empire. Her swashbuckling style, ingenious and relentless self-promotion in an age that admired self-made men and their fortunes, reverence for industry itself, and photographic homages to capitalism and technology made her the perfect lens for Luce's vision.

Eager to combine her skills in photography with a growing social conscience, her partnership with Luce in 1936 provided just the outlet, and Bourke-White became one of four photographers on the staff of Life. The magazine took a human-interest angle, and Bourke-White's first assignment, in October, 1936, was to photograph the construction of the Fort Peck Dam in New Deal, Mont. The inaugural issue used her image, "New Deal, Montana: Fort Peck Dam," on the cover, and devoted the nine-page lead story, "Franklin Roosevelt's Wild West," to her images of life in the town of New Deal. Released on Nov. 23, 1936, the initial issue of Life and its use of Bourke-White's photographs set the tone for the magazine for years to come.

An exhibition, "Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936," is at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., through May 11. It will travel to The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Fla. (Oct. 25-Jan. 4, 2004); Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, N.C. (Feb. 14-May 2, 2004); Fort Wayne (Ind.) Museum of Art (Nov. 13-Jan. 9, 2005); and Portland (Maine) Museum of Art (Jan. 22-March 27, 2005).

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