Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs of Cleve-
land’s iron and steel district and its major industry,
Otis Steel (1927–1929), followed by their re-publica-
tion inAmerican Economic Lifeand inFortune’s
‘‘Hard Coal’’ (February 1931); ‘‘Iron Ore’’ (April
1931); ‘‘Raw Materials in Costly Motion’’ (July
1931); and ‘‘Mill on the Lake’’ (September 1931),
among other portfolios, effectively decontextualized
and systematized romantic Pictorialism. Structures
and workers were enshrouded in clouds, fog, or
smoke, or captured as silhouetted apparitions pier-
cing the darkened sky. Far from being considered
pollutants, smoke and steam enhanced the illusions
snatched from nature, contributing to the symboli-
zation of power as it was magnified in the corporate
nexus. As practiced by Herb Rittase, Ewing Gallo-
way, and the many anonymous corporate photogra-
phers whose work appeared inFortune, this type of
imagery exponentially increased the body of formats
and styles derived from early twentieth-century
romantic and engineering-based prototypes. Thus
choreographed buildings, vehicles, and machines
were re-visualized as mysterious, ineffable pre-
sences—metaphors for the controlling executive pre-
sences who, ensconced in their financial district
offices, had literally decontextualized themselves
from the scene.
Top executives saw themselves and their terri-
tories as abstractions: auratically bathed in light,
shadow, and/or atmosphere; decontextualized via
tight cropping and the close-up; and further ab-
stracted in indeterminate space. The photographic
programs of leading-edge image disseminators Ge-
neral Electric and Ford companies show these
strategies clearly. Examples in the General Elec-
tric’s archives include power stations, dynamos,
and transformers photographed either with or
without workers as scale figures. General Electric
reproduced these as cut-outs or montages on a
blank field, with captions such as ‘‘$4600 buys
this 1667, kv-a. Transformer, 99% efficient, 13
feet high.’’ (Ripley, 1929) Ford’s image program
included the photographs of Charles Sheeler, who
covered the new River Rouge plant. Sheeler’s
photographs update the industrial grid with the
planar complexities of Cubist painting, trans-
mitted through Stieglitz’s gallery 291 and its jour-
nalCamera Work.Criss-Crossed Conveyors(1927)
was reproduced inVanity Fairwith the caption,
‘‘By Their Works Ye Shall Know Them.’’ In
Ford’s company magazineFord News, Sheeler’s
Ladle Hooks(1927) was elevated to the level of a
religious icon; it received the publicists’ appella-
tion ‘‘the Cathedral of Industry.’’ According to
Terry Smith, ‘‘[This is a]n industry without produ-
cers, process, or product...an industry of image,
look, an abstract domain, a suitably clear back-
ground for the pure act of consumption of the sign
to be sold.’’ (Smith 1993, 115–16.) This was the
ultimate abstraction of the industrial zone.1930–1940: Governmental Power
During the Depression years of the 1930s, indus-
trial photography followed major building projects
and these were located in the federal sector. The
key federal projects involving industrial photogra-
phy were power stations, in particular hydroelectric
dams constructed in the Far West. ‘‘The huge scale
of the new power stations and their potential for
transforming society made them more imposing
than anything that had preceded them.’’ (Nye,
1994, 133)
Photographers were retained by the U.S. govern-
ment to document these projects from inception to
completion. As public money was involved, the
intent of these photograph campaigns was rhetori-
cal and propagandistic: to prove fiscal responsibil-
ity, to survey managerial control and worker
safety, to put a closure to the satisfactory sur-
mounting of engineering challenges, and to supply
the burgeoning image agencies (for example, the
Newspaper Enterprise Association andLifemaga-
zine) with grandiose publicity scaled to emphasize
social as well as economic value. The industrial
photographers of the 1930s were expected to
know not only image-making strategies, but also
the various technical processes involved with con-
struction. As differentiated from the photogra-
phers of the contemporaneous Farm Security
Administration photographic project, industrial
photographers on federal construction sites were
permitted to ‘‘draft’’ their own shooting programs
so long as they adequately covered the project to
which they had been assigned. Image types were
codified in line with their rhetorical and engineer-
ing-oriented functions: overall views, taken over
time; details showing the technical intricacies of
construction components; routines of work; equip-
ment and machinery; construction milestones,
often embellished or re-staged for dramatic effect;
and ‘‘fine art’’ views.
Ben Glaha, an engineering draftsman hired to
document the Hoover Dam project, exemplifies
1930s industrial photography. His views of the
dam site along the Colorado River have the grandi-
osity and abstraction of Bourke-White’sMountains
of Ore (1927–1929), but heroic titles (reflecting
heroic corporate identities) have been replaced
with engineering data: ‘‘The Downstream Face ofINDUSTRIAL PHOTOGRAPHY