Object Details
Artist
Margaret Bourke-White
Date
1929 (negative), ca. 1965 (print)
Medium
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions
Image: 19 3/8 × 13 5/8 inches (49.2 × 34.6 cm)
Mount (Matted): 27 15/16 × 22 1/16 inches (71 × 56 cm)
Credit Line
Gift of the artist, Class of 1927, and LIFE Magazine
Object
Number
65.550
Bourke-White’s Otis Steel pictures caught the eye of publisher Henry Luce, who sent her a cable in(…)
Bourke-White’s Otis Steel pictures caught the eye of publisher Henry Luce, who sent her a cable in May 1929 asking her to meet him in New York. Luce recruited Bourke-White as photographer for his new magazine, Fortune. Ore Loading Docks was published in Fortune magazine’s first issue in February 1930 and captured Bourke-White’s modernist aesthetic—starkly beautiful subjects and a fascination with “pattern.” Isolated parts stand in for the whole, an approach Bourke-White used to turn machinery into art. (“Margaret Bourke-White: From Cornell Student to Visionary Photojournalist,” curated by Stephanie Wiles and presented at the Johnson Museum January 24 – June 7, 2015)
