Margaret Bourke-White : the photography of design, 1927-1936 /

Focusing on the first decade of Bourke-White's photographic career, Phillips analyzes and documents the evolution from commercial, industrial subjects to the human-oriented, narrative photo-essay associated with Life from its inception in 1936. From Clarence White she learned the artistic theory of Arthur Dow, who influenced several American art photographers, and received encouragement to pursue photography as a career. In Cleveland in the 1920s, she combined Dow's theory with the modernity of industry, finding "beauty in its power, processes and productivity." Phillips notes her relationship to Sheeler and Karl Strauss. She began her association with Henry Luce in 1929, contributing to the first issue of Fortune in 1930. While magazine work permitted greater interpretive freedom, she solicited commercial assignments concurrently. Trips to Russia for Fortune from 1930 to 1932 initiated her transition toward human subject matter. By 1934, Fortune shifted its focus to political and social issues, and by 1935 Bourke-White overtly stated her desire to develop a candid camera technique. Her collaboration with Erskine Caldwell on You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) encouraged this direction as did her contract with the new Life magazine. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. All levels. S. Spencer North Carolina State University

Many of Bourke-White's photographs are 20th-century icons of "progress," yet it is still startling to see some of the most famous together: the image of a gargoyle on the Chrysler Building; the silver plane flying over downtown Manhattan; Montana's Fort Peck Dam, as part of her series on the New Deal. This catalogue and concurrent exhibit at the Phillips Collection in Washington displays only Bourke-White's early, technology-based work, before she was a featured photographer for Fortune and Time magazines. Industrial cables and aluminum rods are still in all their modernist glory, while workers on the Campbell Soup production line and those in Soviet factories show the muscle behind its mammoth forms. Phillips, curator at the Phillips Collection, contextualizes Bourke-White's work within the culture between the wars, when industry fell into the Depression and women were still early additions to parts of the workforce. With a chronology, selected correspondence and two radio transcripts of Bourke-White speaking ("I never run any risks-even if I do get into tight places that sound dangerous," she said on WNEW in 1935), along with newly published photographs and new research on the images, this catalogue gives nuance to a photographer whose work has become difficult to see behind the myths it helped create. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A star in a niche of her own making where camera, industry, and corporate America merged, Margaret Bourke-White (1904-71) was a celebrity who showed daring on scaffolding while shooting the Chrysler Building, turned the mindless rhythm of an assembly line into a photograph about repetitive shapes, and celebrated the form of automobile fenders. With this book, we are successfully reminded of her grand talent. For a traveling exhibition of the same name, which debuted this May at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, curator Phillips has gathered seldom-seen photographs from the beginning of Margaret Bourke-White's career, photographs that set the stage for her best-known work in Fortune and Life. Bourke-White used a camera to capture the pure, modernist, geometric forms that were part of the industrial environment. For her, brushed aluminum propellers were as much a reflective sculpture as they were airplane parts; smokestacks, oil tanks, and even stacked limestone slabs appear to be the work of artists building on a heavy-duty scale. With a chronology of her career and some never-before-published photographs, this catalog is recommended for photography collections, especially those already owning monographs such as Sean Callahan's Margaret Bourke-White, Photographer.-David Bryant, New Canaan Lib., CT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.