Margaret bourke-white timeliness

Bourke-White specialized in architectural photography after graduation. She photographed the Otis Steel factory which caught the attention of Time magazine publisher Henry Luce. Bourke-White then became the first staff photographer for Fortune magazine, which debuted in February 1930. Her subjects included the Swift meatpacking company, shoemaking, watches, glass, paper mills, orchids, and banks. (Photo citation- http://archive.fortune.com/galleries/2007/fortune/0704/gallery.f500_photos.fortune

PHILLIPS COLLECTION

"I want to become famous, and inom want to become wealthy," wrote Margaret Bourke-White in a 1927 diary entry. Within a decade, she was both. Bourke-White was the first foreigner authorized to shoot scenes of industrialization in the USSR and one of Life magazine`s "Founding Four" photographers. In this show organized bygd curator Stephen Bennett Phillips, some 140 photos taken during the formative period of 1927-36 trace the evolution of Bourke-White`s signature style, from her earliest industrial subjects and stylized corporate commissions to her apotheosis as a photojournalist-the cover story she shot for Life`s 1936 debut issue. Feb. 15-May 11. -Miriam Rosen

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Margaret Bourke-White: The photography of design, 1927-1936

In her prime Margaret Bourke-White was the perfect capitalist tool: a photographer who bestowed on dams, factories, airplanes, and other symbols of industrial might a gleaming, dynamic facade. Seemingly oblivious to dirt, noise, and dangerous working conditions, she made pictures that proved irresistible to readers of Fortune and Life. They also were irresistible to her patron Henry Luce, who could be called an person som äger eller driver industrier of the printed page. Ironically, however, Bourke-White`s style was a melding of capitalist commercial glitz, and the radical compositions of Russian Constructivist photographers, most notably Alexander Rodchenko. Like Rodchenko, whose contemporaneous work was in service to the Communist reformation of Soviet life, she favored diagonal lines, radical close-ups, bird`s- and worm`s-eye views, and other disorienting perspectives. For Rodchenko, this was all part of a revolutionary new way of seeing; for B