You’ve seen her photos before. The picture of Gandhi sitting by his spinning wheel, those snapshots of DC-4s traveling high above Manhattan or the one of a female photographer kneeling on a skyscraper gargoyle. That last one’s actually not a picture she took, but a picture of her. There were plenty of those, too. Enterprising and adventurous, Margaret Bourke-White cut a deep swath through the annals of 20th century photography. The first decade of Bourke-White’s work is the subject of a new exhibition at The Phillips Collection, The Photography of Design, 1927-1936. She would later become famous as the first Western photographer to be allowed access to the Soviet Union, the first female war correspondent and one of the first photojournalists to depict the concentration camps, but Bourke-White’s early pictures focused on the aesthetics of industry, business and machinery.
The first print in the exhibition is one of her best known images, a Chrysler Building gargoyle, shot from behind as the sun gleams off its steel face. At this angle, it thrusts out majestically from the edge of the frame, an example of industry’s ability to achieve beauty, either through function or by accident. Devoid of any people, this picture exhibits Bourke-White’s early comfort with the formalism of lifeless objects and the best works of this collection are those that glorify machine over man, granting the assembly-line nature of automation an almost mystical air.
Fresh out of Cornell University, Bourke-White moved to Cleveland where she was commissioned as the official photographer of the city’s new Terminal Tower. Shooting the building through grillwork, through fog and at night, she was able to expand its aesthetic possibilities through distance, juxtapositions and framing. Her time in Cleveland also provided a rare opportunity to photograph the interiors of steel mills on the city’s outskirts. Through the use of new magnesium flares and gelatin silver paper, Bourke-White was able to capture the mysterious inner workings of these factories, manipulating the heavy contrasts between light and dark. “Republic Steel: Pouring Steel,” moves from all-consuming blackness at the top to a blinding flash of molten steel at the bottom left, beauty emerging from fire and metal.
The first half of the exhibition minimizes the importance of humans in this world of machinery. A series of 75-foot smokestacks fading off into the distance, like columns down a cathedral nave, dwarf two men standing at the extreme bottom of the photo. In “Chrysler: Gears,” massive cogs fill up the frame and, almost as an afterthought, we notice a worker in the lower corner, an insignificant presence in the shadows. A number of her photos center on “mass” industry and its millions of identically produced products. We see close-ups of aluminum rods, blocks of wood, copper pipes and industrial cables. Hundreds of them, identical and overlapping, become personified abstractions: a line of unrecognizable plow blades resembling the legs of chorus dancers.
The second half of the exhibition suffers from the presence of people. As the first photographer for Fortune and Life magazines, Bourke-White shifted her artistic focus to the human suffering caused by the Depression. These early attempts at documentary realism possess a sterility that usually marks others’ photos of objects. There is a sense of detachment and personal distance at odds with the dynamic way in which she shot industrial objects.
As the exhibit progresses, the viewer becomes wearied by comparatively pedestrian depictions of dirty Okies. Bourke-White astounds with her compositions of machines, buildings, planes and zeppelins. As for all the other subjects, you’ve seen it all before.
The Photography of Design is on display until May 11. The Phillips Gallery is located at 1600 21 St., N.W.
