THE AYN RAND OF PHOTOGRAPHY

MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE
THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF DESIGN, 1927-1936
On view at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine
From January 20 through March 20, 2005

Reviewed by Laurie Meunier Graves

Ah, those glamorous, talented, adventurous women of the early 1900s. Some flew planes; some hunted lions with Ernest Hemingway; others would make a virtue out of factory work to become tough, sexy “Rosie-the-Riveters.” Still others became artists and photographers. These pre-1950s, prewomen’s liberation movement women fill me with a sort of awe and admiration, and when I look at old pictures of the their strong, beautiful faces, they seem to say, “Don’t mess with me.”

The photographer Margaret Bourke-White, born in 1904, falls squarely into this category of women “who did.” The Portland Museum of Art has a fascinating but unsettling exhibit of her early work (from 1927 to 1936), and it includes a photograph of her in her studio taken sometime around 1931. Bourke-White has the appearance of the quintessential woman achiever of her times. She looks as though she comes from nowhere and everywhere. With her strong, regular features, sharp chin, and firm nose, Bourke-White is pretty in a middle American sort of way, just enough to be charming but not enough to be threatening. But there she is in another picture, high above the street, clinging to a gargoyle on the Chrysler building in New York. This, to me, is a perfect metaphor for her situation and for her personality, a woman perched precariously in a man’s world. And if Bourke-White’s vision and talent did not match her youthful ambitions, one can still admire her boldness and courage.

In any art exhibit, the work should speak for itself, and in this one, it certainly does, even though the message it sends to contemporary viewers might be quite different from what it sent to viewers in the 1930s. But more on that later. Because of her gender and the relative newness of photography when she began her career as a commercial photographer, Bourke-White was something of a pioneer, and it seems appropriate to begin with a brief description of her background and the era in which she started to work.

In the 1920s, when Bourke-White was a young woman, the United States was moving resolutely from the agrarian age to the machine age, and this brought about an excitement and optimism that seems foolish, innocent, and even misguided to our twenty-first century sensibilities. Evils such as global warming, DDT, dioxins, and mercury poisoning were still in the future, and everything—electricity, telephones, even cars—must have seemed exciting and new back then. In the terrific book that goes with the exhibit, viewers learn something of the tenor of the times. For example, “When [Bourke-White] enrolled at Columbia University in 1921, women had just received the right to vote in national elections and the United States stood on the threshold of a decade of prosperity. Industrial production doubled between 1919 and 1929…Americans operated 7.5 million telephones in 1920, up more than sevenfold since 1900….A mere twelve years after Ford Motor Company began to sell its Model T (1908) there were ten million cars and trucks on the road…The first radio station began service in Pittsburgh in 1920, and five years later 571 stations transmitted signals to almost three million homes and businesses.” In his book Downtown, Peter Hamill writes about “the velocity of change” in reference to New York City, but in the 1920s, the whole country must have felt as though it was changing at warp speed.

Into that exciting era came Margaret Bourke-White with her camera, and as far as her photography career is concerned, it seems that she was born under a fortunate star. Her father, Joseph White, “was an avid amateur photographer who developed his prints in the family bathtub—with Margaret often at his side.” In addition, her father was an inventor and an engineer for a printing press manufacturer, and “[a]round 1912 he took her inside a foundry, where she saw molten iron being poured. The drama and excitement of this scene stayed in her mind for years.” I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to conclude that her father and her childhood experiences provided direction for Bourke-White’s career as a photographer.

At Columbia University, her luck continued to hold. Clarence H. White, a pictorialist photographer, was her teacher, and he believed “that women should participate fully in the world of photography.” Not surprisingly, his courses drew in many female students.

After Bourke-White graduated (from Cornell University), she brought her confidence, energy, and charm to Cleveland, Ohio, and the steel mills, where she took a series of industrial photographs and captured the machine-enthusiasm of her age. From there, it was on to magazines and newspapers, and finally to Henry Luce, publisher of Time magazine. Luce was drawn to Bourke-White’s images and hired her to take pictures for Life and Fortune magazine. Indeed, one of her photographs of a diversion tunnel at Fort Peck Dam was chosen for the first cover of Life. The picture is all circles and spokes, and, inside, a man is on his hands and knees with his back turned toward us. No doubt he is working on something, but he looks as though he’s trapped in the center and is trying to find his way out. In comparison with the huge tunnel, the man looks small and vulnerable.

It is here that we come to the tension between the contemporary viewer (at least this one) and the photographs. As a young woman, Bourke-White was clearly taken with all aspects of the industrial revolution—with machines, with factories, with the process of production. Bourke-White, in her recollection of trying to wheedle her way into the good graces of the president of Otis Steel in Cleveland so that she could take pictures of the factory, remembers “trying to tell him of my belief that there is power and vitality in industry that makes it magnificent for photography, that it reflects the age in which we live.”

Unfortunately, I was unable to muster a similar enthusiasm when looking at her photographs, especially the ones taken of Otis Steel in Cleveland. Bourke-White’s shots of the factory are dirty and ugly, full of stiff smokestacks blowing smoke, and they have a postapocalypse look. They bring to mind a number of associations—none of them good. Among them are the concentration camps of World War II, and, from The Lord of the Rings, Saruman’s destruction of the beautiful green land around Isengard where he builds his awful forges.

Bourke-White’s photographs of Otis Steel are at the beginning of the exhibit, and I must admit I was so taken aback by them that they set a dark mood I was not able to shake for the rest of the exhibit. But the president of Otis Steel had quite a different view. He liked the photographs so much that he “paid $100 apiece for 8 photographs and commissioned 8 more.”

There were, of course, other photographers of the times who were recording the terrible conditions of factories and mills. They were interested in the people and the social conditions rather than the “power and vitality” of the factories. But not Bourke-White. On she went to photograph bananas on a belt, tamales in a can, bottles, steps, aluminum rods, wire, and women with coils of hot dogs on their arms. As she matured, her work became crisper and clearer, and her fascination with pattern and repetition became obvious. Divorced from the spewing smoke and the pollution, the images do take on a sort of beauty, but it is a cold one, without much warmth, and it seems to me that they reflect Bourke-White’s cold eye, at least when she was a young woman. (I must admit I am unfamiliar with her later work.) Going through this exhibit, I couldn’t help but think that Bourke-White was the Ayn Rand of photography, so dazzled by machines and capitalism that she couldn’t really see what was happening or what she was shooting. In most of her photographs, the people look as though they are props for the machines and for the concept of work, and they are nearly devoid of any humanity or personality.

There are a few exceptions, taken in 1936, at the end of the period on which this exhibit focuses.
Several photographs feature the rural poor, who are dirty and whose living conditions look just plain desperate. Apparently, Bourke-White did move on from machines to photojournalism, to capture not only the Depression but also World War II, but those photographs are not included in this exhibit. Instead, we have Bourke-White in the flush of youth, enthralled and infatuated by machines and power. No doubt psychologists would be able to analyze this aspect of her personality, and I will leave such matters to them.

In her time, Bourke-White was criticized for being a commercial photographer, for doing “it” for money, so to speak. This, to me, is more or less irrelevant. Shakespeare did “it” for money, too, but no one denies his genius. In the end, what counts is the quality of the work, its depth, and how it speaks to us. At their best, Bourke-White’s gleaming but aloof images attract the eye, and one can’t help but admire the skill and even the daring that went into some of these photographs. Unfortunately, at their worst, there seems to be an almost willful ignorance that hovers over the photographs. In either case, the work shown in this exhibit doesn’t have the spark or the illumination or the insight necessary for good art. 

 

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