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Turbine, Niagara Falls Power Co.

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Photo © Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA, New York,


Turbine, Niagara Falls Power Co.

1928
gelatin silver print
13 1/2 in. x 9 1/2 in. (34.29 cm x 24.13 cm)
Museum Purchase: Friends Fund, 1985.6

Margaret Bourke-White
American
1904–1971

Margaret Bourke-White was a leading documentary photographer noted for her images of industry and the human condition. Born in New York City in 1904, she studied for a year at Columbia University. There she developed an interest in photography after attending a course in the subject taught by Clarence H. White. By 1927 she had moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where she established a studio. She began to make photographs of industrial subjects, some of which found their way into the hands of publishing magnate Henry Luce. Impressed with Bourke-White's work, Luce hired her in 1929 as Fortune magazine's first staff photographer. Shortly afterward, Bourke-White settled in New York and took a new studio in the Chrysler Building.

During the 1930s Bourke-White's reputation grew as she completed assignments in Germany and the Soviet Union. In 1934, Fortune sent her to photograph the plight of farmers in the drought-stricken Dust Bowl, and from that time forward she became increasingly absorbed in documenting social and humanitarian conditions. Married briefly to literary naturalist writer Erskine Caldwell, whom she met in 1936, Bourke-White during the late 1930s collaborated with him on a number of documentary projects in both America and Europe. After the outbreak of World War II, she served as a war correspondent, taking photographs of concentration camps at Erla and Buchenwald among other subjects. Later assignments took the artist to India, South Africa, Japan, and Korea. The onset of Parkinson's disease gradually put an end to Bourke-White's career, and in 1969 she retired. The artist died in 1971.

Taken in 1928, Turbine, Niagara Falls Power Co. reveals Bourke-White's gift for bringing out both the power and the abstract beauty of her industrial subjects. Seen from above, four large turbines dominate the vertical axis of the composition. Sets of stairs and a catwalk running along the right side of the image give a sense of scale and create the impression that the turbines are tethered together, waiting to be unleashed by their human keepers. In contrast to stereotypes of the industrial scene as gritty and hellish, Bourke-White's photograph of the Niagara Falls Power Company is radiant with clean, reflected light. The gleaming surfaces and swelling organic curves of the machines are ineffably mysterious and uplifting. Like the work of such modernist sculptors as Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), they take on an aesthetic quality that approaches high art.

The feeling of reverence with which Bourke-White approached her industrial subjects causes her work to stand out from that of others who focused on the machine. Although many American painters and photographers addressed the industrial scene during the 1920s and 1930s, few invested it with the mystic and religious overtones seen in Bourke-White's images. Among these, perhaps Charles Sheeler (q.v.) comes closest in his slightly earlier (1927) series of photographs documenting the Ford Motor Company factory at River Rouge, Michigan. In his later paintings, such as the Currier's Amoskeag Canal (q.v.), Sheeler would significantly mute the sense of exaltation that he shared, however briefly, with Bourke-White.

Turbine, Niagara Falls Power Co. was purchased by the Currier Museum of Art in 1985.

VSD

REFERENCES

Stephen Bennett Phillips. Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design 1927-1936. Ex. cat. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, 2003.

Constance W. Glenn, "Bourke-White, Margaret (née White)." In Jane Turner, ed., The Dictionary of Art. 34 vols. New York: Grove, 1996. Vol. 4, p. 586.


Exhibition
1998-1999 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Moments in Time: Master Photographs from the Currier." Oct. 10, 1998 - Jan. 4, 1999.

2012 Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH, "A New Vision: Modernist Photography." Feb. 4 - May 13.

2023 Currier Museum of Art, "Seeing Is Not Believing: Ambiguity in Photography" March 29 -


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