Margaret Bourke-White: a monumental look
Show traces work of photographer
PORTLAND, Maine -- Margaret Bourke-White cut one of the great figures in 20th-century photography. Is there a more totemic image of the heroic photographer at work than Bourke-White -- camera in hand, beret on head -- precariously perched atop a Chrysler Building gargoyle?
At a time when photographers had all the name value of plumbers, and not much more glamour, Bourke-White (1904-1971) endorsed Maxwell House coffee and Camel cigarettes. The heroine of Alfred Hitchcock's "Lifeboat" was said to be modeled on her. Her books were bestsellers. She was front and center in the greatest single media event of the 1930s, the debut of Life magazine, which had a Bourke-White photograph on its cover.
"Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936," which runs through March 20 at the Portland Museum of Art, is a big and exciting show. How big? There are more than 160 photographs and related items by and about Bourke-White. How exciting? So many pictures of dirigibles, skyscrapers, radio towers, and turbines give a giddy sense of a freshly modern world, on the move, proclaiming its modernity.
Like Robert Capa, her successor as Foremost World-Famous Photographer (try saying that five times fast), Bourke-White belongs as much to the history of celebrity as photography -- probably more. Her emergence during a transitional period in the medium initially did wonders for her reputation. She was the Artist as Photojournalist, and at a time when both photojournalism and the idea of photography as an art were still new, such a job description guaranteed acclaim.
Soon enough, though, the consequences of that transition began to eat away at Bourke-White's reputation. Expectations about what photojournalism comprises changed radically, and not in a way that favored her. Bourke-White's artistry, with its self-conscious compositions and studied setups, drains her photojournalism of what soon came to be seen as the genre's primary elements, spontaneity and immediacy. Furthermore, the unapologetically journalistic, or even promotional, intent of nearly all her work confines and dates it.
Her near-contemporary Berenice Abbott shared many of Bourke-White's interests (technology and aerial perspectives, for example), yet Abbott's best work has a timelessness hers does not. Or there's the example of Walker Evans, who managed to become the patron saint of 20th-century American photography while spending much of his career beholden to the same master as Bourke-White, Henry Luce, the proprietor of Life and Fortune (where she worked before Life).
The show's focus is much more on the artist than on the photojournalist. In fact, much of it consists of her promotional work for such companies as Goodyear, Otis Steel, and RCA. As the subtitle suggests, Bourke-White is seen not so much as journalistic recorder as revealer of form: a Platonist with a viewfinder. The end date is key: 1936 is when Life began publication, photojournalism reached a new plane, and Bourke-White's celebrity took off.
Her early work isn't so much about shape or form, though, as about clientele. These photographs neither worship nor denounce. They flatter -- often anachronistically. For all that Bourke-White liked to say "I worship factories," she didn't really accept the machine aesthetic on its own terms -- as, say Charles Sheeler did in his famous images of the Ford plant at River Rouge. She preferred to superimpose an older, more traditional aesthetic. This is nearly as true of her visually crisp later work as of the vaporous Pictorialism she initially relied on. In her images, the genteel tradition domesticates the industrial sublime -- past isn't so much prologue as proscenium. In her later images, what defines her work is a newer but even more pervasive tradition in our culture, the PR tradition.
The quarry in "Indiana Limestone: Limestone Blocks" seems closer in time to the Egypt of the pharaohs than the America of Herbert Hoover. In "Lehigh Portland Cement: Man Pushing Bags," it's the bags that matter, not the man, or even the pushing -- especially not the pushing.
It's a curious thing about Bourke-White's photographs that they're so often lacking in dynamism. Monumentality predicates itself on stasis (so do the long exposure times Bourke-White favored), and the industrial subjects that drew her were nothing if not monumental. This is true even when they're on a human scale, for she invariably shoots even strands of cable or coils of wire in tight, oversized close-up. The gleaming objects in "Russell, Birdsall & Ward: Nuts" aren't meant to be threaded around bolts. They're meant to dominate a skyline. They have an architectural thrust, as of a vaguely Mayan-looking anticipation of Rockefeller Center. (The show includes a dazzling shot of an RCA microphone, radiantly backlit, part of a mural she did for the NBC studios in Rockefeller Center.)
This tendency toward flattery and inflation continues to define Bourke-White's images -- albeit less overtly -- when she goes to work at Fortune, starting in 1929. If she hadn't existed, Luce would have had to invent her -- and vice versa. No one else, either writer or photographer, so clearly expressed -- or sincerely shared? -- the Lucean vision of modern-day bigness and boldness as so much grandeur on the hoof. Even now, there's something thrilling about such a vision, but its lunatic side -- not to mention its capacity to exhaust, and delude -- is all too apparent.
Worse, there's something inhuman about so unrelenting a blend of uplift and hyperbole -- or, rather, it requires inhumanity for its expression. This is Bourke-White's great failing. People are, at best, design elements in her work. She's fond of including human figures, dwarfed by machinery or structure, to give a sense of scale. It's an effective device -- Bourke-White was nothing if not a pro -- yet it's also emblematic of her priorities.
Even when people are full-size, they remain unreal. There's no hint of tears among the women pictured in "
It's not as if industrial subject matter is inherently dehumanizing. Lewis Hine's images of the construction of the Empire State Building offer a chastening contrast to the work Bourke-White was doing at this time. Nor was Bourke-White incapable of taking affecting pictures of people. Her most famous image, from 1948, is of Gandhi at his spinning wheel. Her greatest, surely, is of two South African gold miners deep beneath the earth, from 1950.
The one section of the show where people aren't always subordinated to setting is Bourke-White's photographs from the Soviet Union. In "USSR: Magnitogorsk, Worker Laying Bricks," the effort that was absent in "Man Pushing Bags" is unmistakable in the crook of the worker's back, the tight grip he has on his hammer. The patterning she's so fond of defines "USSR: Moscow, Ballet School, Dancers," but it's so much warmer, livelier, less schematic.
Yet among the Soviet pictures, there's also "USSR: State Farms, Tractor and Workers in Field." It's so lovely it could be a still from Alexander Dovzhenko's "Earth," that supreme masterpiece of agrarian beauty and lethally duplicitous agitprop. As it happened, Bourke-White professed a stout if muddle-headed liberalism. It would inspire such later, explicitly polemical work as "You Have Seen Their Faces," a visual testament against Southern poverty she collaborated on with her second husband, the writer Erskine Caldwell
Even so, politics was irrelevant to the essence of her art. Stalinist collectivization, Lucean paeans to capitalism, ads for Eastern Airlines: It was all the same to her -- the pursuit of form and, yes, the photography of design. The contemporary she most resembles isn't Sheeler or Abbott or Hine. It's Leni Riefenstahl. Except for Hitler or Luce, would anyone have noticed if they'd traded places?
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
