administrators, professors, and graduates, which
percolated into a working familiarity with the
upper echelons of the corporate world.
Bourke-White’s first major clients were the Otis
Steel and Union Trust companies in Cleveland. In
1929 she became a charter and contributing editor
ofFortuneand in1930shemoved to New York.This
led to numerous national and international indus-
trial assignments as well as to major corporate ad-
vertising commissions and to the beginning of her
association with major publishers. Her corporate
and industrial photographs of the late 1920s, fol-
lowed by her industrial and commercial jobs of the
early to mid-1930s, are the most self-consciously
styled of her oeuvre, reflecting early twentieth-cen-
tury corporate ideals and cultures of empire. In her
sequence on Cleveland’s new union station, the
Terminal Tower (1927–1929), the building and its
spire became the hub of numerous ‘‘imperial’’ views
as she moved in from the distance up to the tower,
framed it in massive viaduct arches, positioned it
over ‘‘mountains of ore’’ (the title of one image),
and geysered it over the curving sluices of parallel
railway tracks. Close-up views of the grand lobby
breathe heavy, dark, and jewel-like airs of material
opulence and spatial grandiloquence. Likewise, in
her work for Otis Steel, which the company pub-
lished in a folio-styled brochure, she moved into
and around the blast furnace and featured fiery,
molten steel illuminating its vast, murky halls. This
early work is indebted to Tonalism and language of
pristine Pictorialism as practiced by Clarence White,
Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and Fre-
derick H. Evans. Modernism and Edward Steichen’s
hard-edged shapes, reflections, and shadows lie
behind Bourke-White’s NBC photomurals, exe-
cuted in 1933 for the R.C.A. Building, Radio City,
in Rockefeller Center, New York.Skyscraperof
1935, commissioned by American Catalin Corpora-
tion, andBottled Time, a sequence of work for the
Elgin National Watch Company published inFor-
tunein April 1930, exemplify this more abstract,
direct-to-upscale-consumer approach.
The mid-1930s, capped by her move fromFortune
toLife, were the time of Bourke-White’s maturation
as an artist. Not only did she show her work with
other photographers of the American avant-garde,
butshecodifiedanavant-gardevocabularyofmonu-
mental form, high contrast and, most characteristi-
cally, closely conjoined, repeated objects, positioned
close to the picture plane as freshly minted coinage
from the proverbial assembly line. She came into
prominence writing for and being written about in
leading newspapers and magazines, as an artist,
designer, and ‘‘trapper’’ of ‘‘the Waves of Sound’’
(Vanity Fair1978, 26–27). Her credo exulted the
glory of ‘‘industrial subjects, which are so powerful
and sincere and close to the heart of life....because
the industrialagewhichhascreatedthemispowerful
and art...must hold the germ of that power.’’ (Batch-
elor, May 10, 1930, MBW Papers). Her status as an
independent artist was bolstered by her appropria-
tion of the semantics of advertising and public rela-
tions–grandiose, over-achieving, hyperbolic, and
massively appealing to the image managers of the
American public.
It is widely believed that, due to a change of heart
while photographing the Dust Bowl in 1934 forFor-
tune, Bourke-White gave up the glamorous world of
advertising and devoted the rest of her career to the
human-interest stories she illustrated inLifeand
delineated in her books. These began in the Depres-
sion-scourged South and hit their stride in the Eu-
ropeantheatersofWorldWarII.Thisgeneralization
is misleading. Although it is true that she did turn to
people as her prime subjects and did not court cor-
porate clients after1936, even while freelancing for
Lifefrom 1940 to 1951, she continued to do adver-
tisements(Industrial RayonCorporation, Painesville,
OhioandCoiled Rods, Aluminum Company of Amer-
ica, both 1939). Her work continued to adduce and
promise an ideal ‘‘American way’’ predicated on the
‘‘world’s highest standard of living.’’ Quite possibly
her most famous image from the 1930s, featuring a
billboard with those exact slogans, isFlood Victims,
Louisville, Kentucky(1937). The billboard itself was
a component of a huge national publicity campaign
mounted by the National Association of Manufac-
turers to stimulate consumption and promote indus-
try. Its message aptly summarizes the message of the
voluminous writings and photographs Bourke-
White would produce over the next 25 years. Whe-
thertheimagewasmilitary(WaistGunners,England,
1942) or civilian (Bridge Construction, New York
Thruway, 1954), the glorification of American-fabri-
cated, consumable, and surplus power seared its way
into viewers’ eyes and minds.
Unlike many of her contemporaries in documen-
tary photography, Bourke-White was not part of
the federally funded Farm Security Agency pho-
tographic project led by Roy Stryker in the 1930s.
Nor did she participate in the Standard Oil of New
Jersey-sponsored photography archive amassed
underStryker’sdirectioninthe1940s.Theseprojects
were extremely important stages in the evolution of
documentary photography as it surveyed the succes-
sive landscapes of poverty, prosperity, and an emer-
gent highway culture. This omission comes as some
surprise as Bourke-White was the first twentieth-
century photographer, after Lewis Hine, to be fea-BOURKE-WHITE, MARGARET