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.)
