The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Cultural Studies of the United States)
by Miles Orvell
from The University of North Carolina Press
This is a perceptive study of the relationship between technology and culture. Orvell discusses Whitman and his world, then considers material culture, photography, and literature. Among the cultural figures discussed are writers Henry James, John Dos Passos, and James Agee; photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Margaret Bourke-White; and architect-designers Gustav Stickley and Frank Lloyd Wright. A witty essay on the significance of junk in the 1930s concludes the book.
The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White
Portrait of Myself
Margaret Bourke-white: The Early Work, 1922-1930 (Pocket Paragon Series)
by Ronald E. Ostman; Harry Littell; Margaret Bourke-White
from David R Godine
Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971) was one of the leading photojournalists of her time, a mainstay of the Luce empire whose signature work for Fortune celebrated the machine age and whose later work for Life featured the human face and a "progressive" humanitarian sensibility. Many of her photo essays are classics; indeed those on the Louisville Flood and its victims, on the liberation of the Nazi death camps, and on the poverty of India and Pakistan are now part of the iconography of the twentieth century.
In this brief collection of her earliest work, two art historians present the "unknown" Bourke-White, the young amateur aged eighteen to twenty-six. Her first photographs, created in 1921 under the tutelage of Columbia University's Clarence H. White, were impeccably designed soft-edged still lifes, "painterly" images characteristic of the period but not of the artist. Bourke-White took this technique to college – to the University of Michigan and to Cornell – and there made traditional portraits of campus buildings and, almost by accident, her first "industrial" photograph, a Duchamp-like study of loudspeakers. After graduation she moved to Cleveland, where, trembling with fear and aesthetic excitement, she photographed the interior of the Otis Steel Mill, the trestles of the High Level Bridge, and the new Terminal Tower. It was these thrilling Cleveland photographs, made in 1928–30, that won her an audience with Luce, who sent her on to Fortune . . . and to fame.
The eighty photographs reproduced here have seldom been seen outside the archives of Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and the University of Syracuse Library. They will fascinate anyone interested in the life and work of Margaret Bourke-White and the early history of American photojournalism.
Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography
Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936
by Stephen Bennett Phillips
from Rizzoli International Publications
How did Margaret Bourke-White become the top photographer for Fortune and Life, a globetrotting adventuress who held court in the most glamorous studio on earth--a Chrysler Building penthouse patrolled by alligators, adjacent to the fierce gargoyle she made famous? By first muscling in as a master of the masculine art of corporate photography. For the first time, that early work has gotten its due in Stephen Bennett PhillipsÂ’ Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design 1927-36. In insightful prose and glossily reproduced black-and-white photos, he opens our eyes to her fast-developing genius. Her 1927 photos of ClevelandÂ’s Terminal Tower expertly aped the fuzzy, romantic pictorialism of early Edward Steichen, but her 1928 shot of the same building through the spiral grillwork shows her rigorous sense of composition. After she discovered magnesium lighting, her pictures of what couldÂ’ve been ordinary industrial scenes acquired stunning star power. Rows of tin soup cans, aluminum rods, hogs hanging in a stockyard, Moscow ballet dancers, Wurlitzer organ pipes: she transformed them all into patterns bespeaking brute power. Her camera was a magic device that transformed everything she saw into a shiny Deco masterpiece. This book is as smart and beautiful as its stellar subject. --Tim Appelo
It was in a photography class as a freshman at Columbia University that Bourke-White was first exposed to the work of Arthur Wesley Dow and the abstract style that quickly came to characterize her own work. Upon moving to Cleveland in 1927, Bourke-White began creating abstract photographs of the city's industrial architecture, an unusual subject for a female photographer at that time. The world of machines and technology was a familiar one for Bourke-White, however, whose father was an engineer and inventor. And the monumental forms, geometric shapes, and cold steel of industrial plants and their machines lent themselves perfectly to the abstract style Bourke-White had already developed in her work.
The resulting sparse, yet powerful compositions of American industry rivaled the similarly-themed paintings of Precisionist artists Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, and quickly pushed Bourke-White's work to the forefront of American abstraction. It was on the basis of these early photographs, icons of American strength and steadfastness in uncertain times, that Henry Luce offered Bourke-White a job shooting images for the pages of Fortune. When he launched Life magazine in 1936, Bourke-White's photograph of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana graced the first cover.
Margaret Bourke-White: Photography of Design, 1927-1936 is a groundbreaking volume, an exploration of the first decade of the career of a remarkable photographer. An essay by Stephen Bennett Phillips chronicles these years and interprets the work produced, much of which has never before been published. This book is the companion to the nationwide traveling exhibition of the same name, organized by The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.
Margaret Bourke-White: Photographer
from Bulfinch
Power and Paper Margaret Bourke-White: Modernity & the Documentary Mode
by Margaret Bourke-White
from Boston University Art Gallery
Steel & real estate: Margaret Bourke-White and corporate culture in Cleveland, 1927-1929 ; an exhibition organized by the College of Wooster Art Museum ... 2000 ; guest curator Geraldine Wojno Kiefer
For the World to See: 2 (A Studio book)
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